News and Analysis
Survey: Retail Associates Seek Mobile Tech to Defend Against E-Commerce
According to the results of a new survey out this morning, nearly half of store associates say consumers are sometimes more knowledgeable about products than they are, but assistive mobile devices are helping these associates prevent customers from leaving their stores empty-handed and making their purchases online.
Street Fight Daily: Lord & Taylor Sells Online With Walmart, Retailers Embrace Smaller Stores
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Lord & Taylor Agrees to Start Selling on Walmart.com… Retailers Embrace Small-Format Stores in Age of E-Commerce… Marketing Budgets Ebb as Brands Demand Results…
Google Local Service Ads: Ready for Primetime
“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..
Latest Posts
Study: 14.7 Million People Engaged ‘Locally’ with Retail Brands in Q4
A new report by the Location-Based Marketing Association and local analytics company Venuelabs looks at the amount and quality of “local” consumer interactions. As local activities like reviewing, checking in, or posting a photo become ubiquitous across platforms, the volume of location-specific (versus brand-specific) digital engagement with brick-and-mortar businesses has exploded…
Big Data and Local Search: The Netflix Precedent
We’ve entered an era when product decisions can be made not by analysis of demographics or user testing but by extremely fine-tuned measurements of current user activities. For local search, the question becomes just how many of our passive online activities can be converted into data points to be examined for purposes of marketing and product development?
Case Study: Bakery Relies on Hyperlocal Press, Yelp for New Customers
When Donna Lawson first opened the doors at Stuffed Cakes, she ran a series of daily deal promotions through CBS Local and Urban Dealight to spread the word about her Seattle-based bakery. Now two years later, Lawson relies primarily on press mentions on hyperlocal sites like the West Seattle Blog, as well as positive reviews on Yelp, to get new customers coming through the door…
Street Fight Daily: Aol Under Armstrong, Big Moves in Online Delivery
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… At AOL Under Tim Armstrong, the Only Constant Is Change (AdAge)… Made To Order: Big Moves In Online Food Delivery (ReadWrite)… Report: Geo-Aware, Geofenced Ads Outperform Other LoMo Targeting (Screenwerk)…
Yelp Hits 100 Million Uniques as Users Shift to Mobile
Yelp reported mixed earnings on Wednesday as wider than expected losses tempered strong revenue growth in the fourth quarter. The reviews site brought in $41.2 million during the quarter, taking its annual revenue to $137.6 million for 2012. The overwhelming majority of its revenue growth came on the backs of local advertisers as brand spending remained flat…
Channeling Starbucks, FiveStars Seeks Loyalty in the Form of a Gift Card
The Mountain View, Calif., company is launching a new gift card product aimed at helping businesses transform new customers into returning customers through its POS-integrated loyalty platform. The company has piloted a co-branded gift card with a handful of small retail chains since December, and plans to open the feature to its smaller merchants with the release…
Why Mom-and-Pops Will No Longer Pay for ‘Social Media Management’
The social media hype bubble has burst, and most very small businesses have not realized their ROI in social media. They’re not willing to pay my company — or anyone else — hundreds of dollars a month to market their company on Facebook or Twitter. Instead they are diverting those dollars to pay per click options, SEO, optimizing their websites for conversion and mobile, or targeted local media advertising…
Survey ‘Paywalls’ May Not Be as Good as They Sound for Local Media
While surveys may be a good source of revenue, it’s not a long-term solution for local news sites:There is an inherent supply-and-demand issue — not very different from the one that arises with online display ads. As more and more publishers adopt Google Consumer Surveys, Google can begin dropping its publisher payout because it has enough supply…
Street Fight Daily: Gannett Paywall Pays Off, AOL Sunsets Hipster.com
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… The Case for Paywalls: Gannett Gains While Digital First Experiments (Poynter)… More Change At AOL: Photosharing App Hipster.com Is Shutting Down (TechCrunch)… PayPal Destroys Google Wallet, MasterCard, Square, and Visa in Digital Wallet Study (VentureBeat)…
Discussion of Local Marketing Emphasizes the Essential Role of Data
In a webinar on Tuesday YP’s Sanjay Sood and Andrew Shotland of LocalSEOGuide talked about the evolving local data ecosystem as well as the growing opportunities for marketers to leverage these new datasets to buttress existing local marketing efforts…
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
AI Won’t Fix Advertising – It May Scale Its Chaotic Nature