News and Analysis
Google Websites — To Infinity and Beyond?
“In the developing world, Google has a simplified path to the GMB where if a business first creates a website they can get verified more easily,” Mike Blumenthal notes. “Thus the website becomes the hook into Google’s data funnel. In the US, and most other developed countries, I would speculate that it is typically the other way around”
Big Political Ad Spend Set for Local in 2018, but Will News Sites Be Ready?
Political ad spending totaling $1.9 billion will pour into the digital space, most of it on the local level, Borrell Associates estimates in its 2018 forecast. But daily newspapers and local news “pure-plays” will have to fight hard for their share against Facebook, Google and the other digital platforms.
Latest Posts
5 Reasons to Add Gift Cards to a Digital Loyalty Program
Promoting customer loyalty is a broad goal that local merchants are tackling in many different ways. While plenty of platforms utilize mobile redemptions and out-of-the-box rewards or coupons to curry favor with consumers, an increasing number of loyalty providers are moving outside the virtual environment with pre-loaded physical gift cards…
Street Fight Daily: Yahoo Talks ‘Localization,’ Smartphone Adoption Reaches Majority
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Checking Into Foursquare? Yahoo’s CFO Talks About Next Mobile M&A — Including Importance of “Localization.” (AllThingsD)… Pew: 61 Percent In US Now Have Smartphones (MarketingLand)… Yelp Eyes Shopping On Site (SocialTimes)…
With Disparate Data, Factual Founder Sees Opportunity
In a fireside chat with Marketing Evolution CEO Rex Briggs at Street Fight Summit West Tuesday, Gil Elbaz, chief executive at Factual, the location data company, said there’s a massive opportunity for startups to help digest and analyze the massive amount of data coming from mobile devices. The challenge, says Elbaz, is folding additional information into location data to help better understand the context of the user…
Why Marketplaces Fail, and How to Make Them Work in Local
Earlier this spring, Andrei Hagiu, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, published a piece in the Harvard Business Review looking at why marketplaces fail. Based on recent research, Hagiu, and his co-author Julian Wright, broke down the various pitfalls of building a marketplace, concluding that on the continuum between multi-sided platform and reseller, most businesses fell closer to the reseller end of the spectrum…
With the Point-of-Sale, Simple and Open Breeds Success
During a panel at the Street Fight Summit West moderated by Mark Canon of IBID Strategic Consulting on Tuesday, Patrick Gauthier, Head of Product Strategy, Retail Services, PayPal; Square’s strategic partnerships chief Chuck Kimble, and Clover CEO Leonard Speiser took a deep dive into the delicate dynamics of bringing local businesses’ payments into the cloud…
Yelp VP Ghaffary: 2.5 Trillion in Commerce Will Remain Offline
Contrary to Marc Andreessen’s recent claim, offline retail is not going to die, said Mike Ghaffary, VP at Yelp, during the morning keynote at Street Fight Summit West in San Francisco Tuesday. Ghaffary argued that the majority of the over $3 trillion in commerce will stay offline — and subsequently, the largest opportunity isn’t in bringing commerce online, but in using the web to support it offline…
Beyond Likes: Win Hearts with Emotional Marketing