News and Analysis

Google Local Service Ads: Ready for Primetime

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“While I do think this is about a new revenue stream in new categories and cleaning up spammy industries the rebranding might just also be an effort (unusual for Google) brand clarity around their Google Home product,” Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm in their bi-weekly column..

Deep Dive Into Facebook Finds Dim Revenue Hopes for News Sites

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Grzegorz Piechota, a digital strategist for news media companies worldwide, talked with Street Fight recently about his research into Facebook for WAN-IFRA and what his findings may augur for publishers in their quest for more revenue from the platforms, especially at the local level.

Street Fight Daily: Facebook Sets Sights on Yelp and Foursquare, Uber Approves $10B SoftBank Deal

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook Relaunches Events App as Facebook Local… Uber Approves SoftBank’s Multi-Billion Dollar Investment Offer… Spirited Media Fights Collapse of Local News…

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: Discover Pushes Paypal In-Store, Twitter Opens Self-Serve Ads

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.Discover Pushes PayPal’s In-Store Service as First Data Holds Out (Wall Street Journal)… Twitter Opens Up Self-Serve Advertising Platform to All Businesses (GigaOm)… Won’t You Be in My Nextdoor Network? (AllThingsD)…

5 Tools For Improving Email Delivery Rates

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Marketers can spend hours crafting the perfect e-newsletters and researching the most opportune times to send their messages out, only to have their emails get bounced before they reach their subscribers’ inboxes. As inboxes get tougher to penetrate, marketers are looking for new ways to ensure their messages get through. Here are five tools that marketers can use to improve their email delivery rates…

Survey Shows Rise In Mobile Search as a Starting Point for Consumers

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A new survey, released by Telmetrics and xAd, indicates that there is increasing use of mobile devices by consumers as a part of their path-to-purchase, as well as increasing desire for local. The results found that 45% of consumers go to their mobile device first when starting a search. One-third said they used mobile throughout their purchasing process, two-thirds switched to another device or converted offline…

Street Fight Daily: Foursquare’s Plans Leaked, Google Now on iOS

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.Leaked Doc Shows Foursquare’s Big Plans for Your Check-in Data (CNet)… Google Brings Virtual Assistant to iOS ‘Now’ (Internet2Go)… Jack Dorsey Talks Square and Wearable Devices (New York Times)…

As Tide Turns, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley Responds to Critics

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The technology community seems to have turned on Foursquare in recent months, with some people publicly deriding the once-adored company. Dennis Crowley, the company’s founder, responded to criticism Monday morning, asserting that Foursquare is in the process of “basically reinventing local search.”

How National Advertisers Can Market Locally Without Losing Brand Consistency

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The biggest challenge large brands face when utilizing local marketing platforms is keeping their messages consistent. Sixty-four percent of brands surveyed are looking for ways to eliminate the customer confusion that can occur when different marketing messages are sent out across competing platforms, and 81% say communicating a consistent brand message is their top priority for the upcoming year. Here are five ways that brands can do just that…

The Unique Position of Hyperlocal Publishers in a Real-Time Bidding World

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RTB, by definition, is a digital advertising technology that lets marketers buy and publishers sell display ads dynamically, in real time, on an impression-by-impression basis. In this rapidly evolving world, publishers become relegated to a supply of cookies for marketers to target versus an audience targetable through the association of the publisher’s content and audience profiles. Here’s what’s needed for local publishers to unlock more ad inventory value in this environment…

Street Fight Daily: Square Beefs Up Register, LivingSocial Hacked

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.Square Beefs Up Its Register for Restaurants (AllThingsD)… LivingSocial Hack Exposes Data for 50 Million Customers (New York Times)… Life360, A Family Networking App With More Users Than Foursquare, Is Now Headed For Cars, Smart Home Systems (TechCrunch)…

What Hyperlocal Marketers Can Learn From Disney’s Wearable Devices

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We talk a lot in the hyperlocal industry about what the future of offline marketing and commerce will look like. Mostly it would seem to involve taking the advantages of online marketing and shopping (customization, personalization, analytics, actionable CRM data, etc.) and bringing them into the real world of retail stores. Different players have been experimenting with different elements of this online-to-offline migration of technology, but the Walt Disney Company has really taken the ball and run with it…

Openings & New Hires at Amazon, AOL, WebMD, Edmunds, Swipely and more…

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Ray King is an extremely clever and creative visionary in the space and as a graduate of M.I.T. majoring in computer science and later becoming the CEO of Snapnames. He is a perfectionist. His new company Top Level Design, seeks to capitalize on new “top-level” domains awaiting approval. Read about more hyperlocal execs on the move in this week’s Movers & Shakers column…