News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Facebook to Elevate Local News, Amazon Go Shifts Retail Paradigms
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook to Push More Local News Stories into Feed… How Amazon Go Will Drive Brands to Develop New Ways to Target Customers… Consumer Time Spent on Publisher Sites Fell in 2017…
Q&A: Does Google’s Latest Product Mean Death by a Thousand Cuts for Brands
Google really left businesses hanging with the Q&A release, Mike BLumenthal tells David Mihm in their biweekly column: “We had enough engineering cycles that we could “step into the breach” of what is obviously a big brand problem. Whether it is long term or not depends on what Google can parse from the questions in terms of improving results. “
Street Fight Daily: Google Tests DIY Local-News App, Twitter Adds New Ad Tactic for Brands
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Is Testing a New App That Would Let Anyone Publish Local News Stories… Twitter Now Lets Advertisers Sponsor Publishers’ Moments… Morgan Stanley Says Amazon’s Red-Hot Ad Biz Not a Threat to Duopoly…
Latest Posts
How Crowdfunding Is Changing the Way Local Causes Raise Money
Crowdfunding projects are a form of content marketing, a way to inform a reader about an organization and compel them to give without subjecting them to an explicit sales pitch. It fits in with what donors say they want from the causes they support — more results and less solicitation.
Why Are These 5 Apps Tracking Your Location?
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
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
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Gowalla 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
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.
Street Fight Daily: Retailers Track Shoppers In-Store, In Defense of Foursquare
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Attention, 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’
“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)
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…
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Meta Is Automating Ads, But Brands Still Face a Bigger Problem