News and Analysis
LBMA Podcast: Verizon, Omnicom, Ericsson & Placecast
This Week in Location Based Marketing is a weekly video podcast from the Location Based Marketing Association with Asif Khan, Rob Woodbridge & Aubriana Lopez. On the show: Denver airport, LinkNYC, O2’s Weve, Radius8, Selfridges.
Street Fight Daily: Thumbtack Brings AI to Local Services, Amazon Go Model to Expand
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… How Thumbtack Creates Work By Giving the Yellow Pages an AI Twist… Amazon Plans to Open As Many As Six More Amazon Go Stores This Year… Twitter Tightened Up the Requirements for Its Amplify Publisher Program…
Street Fight Daily: Google Debuts ‘Auto Ads,’ Digital Media Titan Vox Cuts Staff En Masse
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Debuts AdSense ‘Auto Ads’ with Machine Learning… Vox Media Cuts About 50, Scales Back Social Video… Snapchat’s E-Commerce Strategy Hit a New High…
Commentary
GroupMe Launches ‘Joinable’ Groups (Pssst, groupflier Already Has Them!)
We’ve been over this before: while at AOL in the ’90s I failed to get approval for something I dubbed “Broadcast IM” — the ability to send instant messages via IM (AIM) to more than one person simultaneously, with each user’s response seen by everyone. Kinda like a listserv. Kinda like, yeah, Twitter.
Anyway, a few years later along came the wonderful (for its time) Upoc — group mobile texting and voice messaging. Then the tech bubble and subsequent mobile innovation collapse and general malaise among Americans regarding their use of cellphones beyond blabbing. I feared data on cellphones would become “soccer” – popular everywhere else in the world but too difficult with T9 for lazy Americans. Tick Tock… Hello iPhone. At last things began to really change, as we all now know…
Snapshot: Mobile-Social-Local by the Numbers
I came upon some interesting numbers on mobile social media worth sharing. Lisa Braziel at ignite social media pulled together data from a number of different studies of late to tell a bit of a story about the recent evolution in mobile-social. Unfortunately, like most research of breadth, it’s a piece of the past and not a realtime reflection. So keep that in mind while digesting.
SNL Kagan looked at location-based services activity between ’09 and ’10, finding that usership almost tripled. Braziel concluded this, in addition to other data points, indicate 2011 could be the year of mobile social — where it goes truly mainstream. Take a look at the graphic from eMarketer…
AOL: Time To Pack It In Or Patch Things Up?
Wow, everyone’s ganging up on Patch these days. No surprise, since it’s tied so closely to Aol., a company that has been declared dead so many times by frustrated naysayers that if it ever did expire nobody would believe the news. Yeah, Patch probably gets the dark shade of that negative halo…
Latest Posts
5 Tools for Building a Community Marketplace
With their built-in audiences already in place, hyperlocal publications are able to easily overcome one of the biggest obstacles to getting a community marketplace off the ground. However, technical challenges still remain, and building a marketplace from scratch can be extraordinarily time consuming and expensive. Now, a handful of vendors are offering a solution, providing publishers with the tools they need to create custom marketplaces that can be up and running in a matter of days…
Street Fight Daily: PayPal Nears Deal For Braintree, Intuit Overhauls SMB Product
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… PayPal Nears Deal for Braintree Payments (Wall Street Journal)… Intuit Overhauls QuickBooks Online as Competition for Small Businesses Ramps Up (AllThingsD)… < strong>eBay Unveils Click & Collect Service So Small Merchants Can Offer In-Store Collections (TheNextWeb)…
Is Content King in Local Too?
In the pantheon of buzzwords overtaking pitch decks and CMO-speak, “content marketing” is the new darling. The term has legitimate grounding to be fair, but like “long tail” and “web 2.0” in days past, its overuse precedes it. Content marketing also isn’t anything new — it’s been done for years, albeit under the ethically challenged “advertorial” rubric among other flavors. Now it’s new, improved, and hitched to en vogue terms like “native.”
In Nod To SaaS Future, ReachLocal Rolls Out Lead Management Product
The company is extending its subscription ReachEdge product to a general audience, providing tools for merchants to not only generate, but also manage leads that come directly to a business’s website or through a display or search campaign. Kris Barton, the company’s director of product, says the problem that software needs to solve for small businesses today is that of converting demand into customers…
Street Fight Daily: Regulators Crackdown on Fake Reviews, Facebook ‘Closes The Loop’
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Give Yourself 5 Stars? Online, It Might Cost You (New York Times)… Facebook Connects Impressions To Offline Sales For Telcos (MarketinLand)… Mobile Payments Are One-Third of Braintree’s Business (PandoDaily)…
What Scale Means After Patch and Groupon
Macroeconomic developments and internal politics aside, both Tim Armstrong and Andrew Mason succumbed to the flawed assumption, held by many at the time, that local was a land grab. They mistook opportunity with urgency, falsely believing that the local market was some homogenous block, which would open its coffers to the first company that invested enough money, or put enough feet on the street, to make it work…
5 Tools Retailers Can Use to Create Indoor Maps
Mobile navigation apps can easily direct consumers to a business’ front door, but once shoppers step foot inside — where the real action takes place — they’re usually on their own. Now, a handful of indoor mapping vendors are using hyperlocal technology to help retailers, malls and other large venues take the next step in guiding customers through the purchase funnel, with tools for developing interior maps that can be used to direct shoppers toward specific aisles or locations within an establishment…
LBMA Podcast: Placecast’s New Mobile Ad Platform, Bing Partners With Local Corp
On the show: Audi brings public desire and reward to the Mini in London, Estimote powered by iBeacon is just the start of the mote world, Coca-Cola’s Positivity Wall, and PayPal takes their hands-free payments to the masses. Plus Chuck Martin’s Mobile Minute gives us the Cool vs. Creepy scale for location based marketing…
Street Fight Daily: Google Wallet Comes To iOS, Groupon’s Monster Rally
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Google Wallet Finally Comes to the iPhone (With a Big Asterisk) (AllThingsD)… Three Reasons Groupon’s Monster Rally Will Continue (Wall Street Journal)… Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman Ignored Advice From Elon Musk and Peter Thiel And Succeeded Anyway (CNNMoney)…
Community News Revenues: How the Networks Compare to the ‘Indies’
I was surprised — shocked, actually — to discover that the regional community news network Daily Voice has average ad sales of only $38,000 annually on a current basis at each of its 41 sites in suburban Connecticut and New York. Is this the new normal for ad revenue at community news sites? I went to four other community news publishers-owners, all independents, to get their reaction…
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