News and Analysis

Foot Traffic Analysis Shows Height of Black Friday Retail Bump

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The 2017 holiday shopping season is off to a healthy start, with consumer spending on Black Friday reaching a record $5 billion. Data from ShopperTrak shows that traffic at brick-and-mortar stores decreased less than 1% from Black Friday last year, which is actually good news compared to what some analysts had been fearing.

Street Fight Daily: Shoppers Swarm to Social, Snapchat’s Redesign Goes Live

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… More Facebook and Instagram Users Discussed Last Weekend’s Shopping than Super Bowl… Snapchat Simplifies Design to Spur Use… Benchmark and Menlo Commit to Sell Shares of Uber to SoftBank…

Mobile Strategies That Retail Brands Are Using to Fuel Holiday Sales

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This holiday season, retailers with physical locations are working feverishly to compete against e-commerce giants like Amazon. Technologies that capture historical, location-based data from devices have become the next great hope for these brands, even as the physical and online shopping worlds continue to merge.

Latest Posts

Why Local Media Should Build Search Products to Take on the PurePlays

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In order to appear competitive, most local media companies have formed digital divisions that offer services for local businesses that are available only through deals with pure-play companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo, which guarantees that a certain portion of the business we generate will always end up in their hands. There simply has to be a better way…

5 Mobile Marketing ‘Musts’ for SMBs

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As more consumers look to their smartphones to engage with business locally, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) need to lay out a concise mobile marketing strategy. In a Street Fight webinar Tuesday sponsored by YP, Asif Khan of the Location-based Marketing Association, and YP’s David Williams discussed the trends that make mobile a must for SMBs, and highlighted a handful of first steps that local businesses can take to keep up with their smartphone-wielding customers….

Street Fight Daily: Phone Firms Sell Data, A Day in Court for Yelp

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.Phone Firms Sell Data on Customers (Wall Street Journal)… Another Day in Court for Yelp (New York Times)… Hyper-Local: Not A Behavioral Disease (Medium)…

Swipely Raises $12M to Expand Push Into SMB Payment Analytics

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The payments space is starting to settle down. The flow of seed funding has slowed, and a handful companies have separated from the pack, raising meaningful capital over the past year. Add Providence-based Swipely to that list. The payments processing and analytics play has raised $12 million in new funding in a series B round led by Shasta Ventures…

Waze Builds Out Traffic Maps to Add Context in Location

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Andy Ellwood, the company’s senior director of business development, will be appearing on a panel at Street Fight Summit West in a couple of weeks in San Francisco to talk about how the future of mapping tech plays into hyperlocal marketing. Street Fight caught up with him recently to talk about how Waze makes money, the vitality of context, and fighting off Google…

5 Tips For Optimizing Hyperlocal Sites For Tablets

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The real question for hyperlocal publishers isn’t how important tablet readers are, but how best to cater to this group. The publishing standards that work on PC browsers don’t always translate to tablet screens. Here are five strategies that hyperlocal publishers should consider when creating content for readers on tablet devices…

Street Fight Daily: Seamless GrubHub Merge, Wanderful Media Raises $9M

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.GrubHub, Seamless, and the Importance of the Purchase (Bloomberg Businessweek)… Newspaper Companies Invest Another $9M In Local Deal Startup Wanderful Media (TechCrunch)… What Patch Employees Were Told During the Friday Evening Conference Call (Romenesko)…

VP Ghaffary: Yelp Is the ‘Local Layer’ of the Internet

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Mike Ghaffary, a grad school friend of CEO Jeremy Stoppelman who helped to write one of Yelp’s first advertiser contracts, now serves as the company’s vice president of business development (and will give a keynote address at Street Fight Summit West in San Francisco next month). Street Fight caught up with Ghaffary recently to discuss the relationship between content and data in local discovery, and why competitors will have a hard time “killing Yelp.”

5 Tools Brands Can Use to Create Socially Targeted Ads

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In a single day, a tech-savvy twenty-something might tweet about a yoga class, check-in at Target, ask friends on Facebook to recommend a local cafe, and post photos on Instagram from inside Whole Foods. Individually, these social media updates might not mean much. But collectively, they can be a useful tool for advertisers trying to get a deeper look inside the minds of their local customers. Here are five tools that merchants can use to create socially targeted ads…

In Push to Profitability, Patch Trims Staff and Promotes Kalin to CEO

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AOL’s Patch network of community news sites made significant staff cuts on Friday among its regional news teams and promoted Steven Kalin to CEO, in what looks to be its biggest move yet toward reaching its long-promised goal of profitability by the end of 2013…