News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: In-House Programmatic Expands, Facebook Demotes Engagement-Baiting Posts

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Transparency and Brand-Safety Concerns Drive Expansion of In-House Programmatic… Facebook Will Soon Demote Posts That Beg for Likes, Comments, and Shares… Refinery29 Lays Off Staff, Citing a ‘Correction in the Digital Media Space’…

CraveLabs Launches Self-Service Location Intelligence Solution

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In what could be seen as a signal of things to come for the mobile-location industry, CraveLabs is opening up its platform and launching a suite of self-service tools to give media planners and location analysts more open access to the company’s suite of location intelligence solutions.

Jobs and New Openings at Qualtrics, Vivial and Reveal Mobile

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Every two weeks, Geoff Michener covers some of the latest openings and new hires in this dynamic industry. This week’s edition includes moves and new openings at Sinclair Broadcast Group, Townsquare Media, and Balehu.

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: Foursquare Shows ‘Check-In’ Ads, LivingSocial Cuts Back

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyFoursquare Starts Showing Ads After You Check In (AdAge)… LivingSocial To Stop Producing Local Events, Cut At Least 30 Jobs (Washington Business Journal)… Revamped Google Maps App Aims to Give Users More Content (Wall Street Journal)…

Why Are These 5 Apps Tracking Your Location?

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Data privacy has become a particularly prickly issue in the mobile marketing space. As brands shift more and more of their marketing budgets to mobile initiatives, many want to emulate the behavioral targeting of a data-rich desktop environment on the cookie-less mobile medium. A number of mobile apps have started collecting user location information despite the fact that it’s not particularly relevant to their function. Here are a few that might surprise you…

6 ‘Microfencing’ Tools for Retailers

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Dozens of popular geofencing platforms help retailers generate foot traffic — but what happens after these potential customers cross a store’s threshold is anyone’s guess. In an effort to drive traffic to specific points inside their stores — like special displays, brand kiosks, or promoted products — retailers and brand manufacturers are beginning to utilize “microfencing” solutions from indoor navigation vendors. Here are six tools that retailers and brands can use for in-store “microfencing.”

Street Fight Daily: Gowalla Founder Leaving Facebook

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyGowalla Co-Founder Josh Williams to Depart Facebook (AllThingsD)… The False Hope of Hyperlocal (Digiday)… Does In-Store Location Tracking Cross The “Creepy Line”? (MarketingLand)…

Why Local is the Future of Commerce

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The past decade has seen a slow but persistent transformation in the set of services consumers use to navigate the local marketplace. One by one, technology firms have recreated or reinvented various layers of the local shopping experience, disrupting industries and opening doors for new ones to emerge. The transformation began in search, but companies have since started to rethink the way we buy and retrieve these goods and services as well as the way businesses reward, and retain, past customers, creating a coordinated “stack,” to borrow a term from computing.

7 Strategies for Maximizing the Success of SMB Social Media Campaigns

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More than four out of every five small businesses now use Facebook as a marketing vehicle, but that doesn’t mean merchants on Main Street have social media all figured out. Thirty-one percent of merchants who don’t use social media say they “don’t know how,” and 13% say they “don’t know what to post.” Here are seven strategies for maximizing the success of an existing social media campaign from a few of the experts who work in this field.

Street Fight Daily: Retailers Track Shoppers In-Store, In Defense of Foursquare

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyAttention, Shoppers: Store Is Tracking Your Cell (New York Times)… A (Modest) Defense of Foursquare (Inc.)… We Want Privacy From The Government, But We’re An Open Book On Social Media (Guardian)…

Leaf CEO: For POS Startups, It’s a ‘Race Against Time’

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“Anyone selling software to SMBs would love it if distribution was through ecommerce or retail,” says Aron Schwarzkopf. “The problem with the industry however, is that SMBs have never reacted well to that. Remote distribution never worked. … But I do believe that five years from now the POS could be the gateway to the SMB. And that the way you will get to the small business may be through applications that work through the POS.”

Customization Failure: Why Hyperlocal Hasn’t Scaled (Yet)

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Most customization that attempts to deliver hyperlocal, or even just local results, falls short. The problem is that they (and we) don’t have much more or better local content and advertising to output than we did in the days before social media and smartphones. A tool is built to operate on a national scale, but the landscape of finding the local information is messy and chaotic, lacking structured data, or consistent geographic coverage…

LBMA Podcast: Thumbvista’s Linden Skeens

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In this week’s episode, Nordstrom brings Pinterest into its stores; eMart’s flying store; What3Words tries to make physical location easier with 3 words; Shopperception goes deep into buyer behavior in physical stores; WyWy signs up Vodafone for cross-screen advertising; Foursquare and Deezer partner for concert check-ins. Plus special guest Linden Skeens of Thumbvista….