News and Analysis

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

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…

Learning to Work on Your Startup Even While Executing on the Day-to-Day

“Some of the best companies you couldn’t define their market size on day one,” says Foundry Group’s Brad Feld. “Nobody has any idea what their market sizes are. Others a lot of times you think the market size is X and it’s either an order of magnitude bigger or smaller. “

LBMA Podcast: Honda France, American Eagle, UpCurve buys Closely

This Week in Location Based Marketing is a weekly video podcast from the Location Based Marketing Association with Asif Khan and Rob Woodbridge. On the show: Macallan, Locus Labs + Acuity Brands, Amazon & Fexy Media, Lufthansa, Brandify. Case Study from Shopkick.

Latest Posts

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…

Understanding the Local Consumer’s Online Path to Purchase

Consumers are using the web to become highly informed about everything they buy, and what they see (or don’t) about a business online affects whether they purchase from that company. It’s much more complex and time-consuming for small businesses to reach these digital consumers than ever before, so it’s up to solutions providers to help clients create and sustain a total web presence…

5 Misconceptions SMBs Have About Mobile Advertising

Even as small and medium-sized businesses are increasingly warming to digital marketing, questions and misinformation persist about how mobile campaigns reach local consumers and influence their behavior. We asked a few folks who work in the mobile sphere to provide us a taste of the kind of concerns about mobile ads they’re hearing from SMBs…

Facebook Looking for Local Media Partners With ‘Reach and Relationships’

“In an ideal world, all SMBs would come to Facebook to manage their own pages,” said Dan Levy, the company’s director of small business. “But our recognition is that there are folks who have those trusted relationships with SMBs,” and Facebook wants to work with them…

Street Fight Daily: ‘Find My Friends’ on Facebook, DFM Considers Paywall

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.Facebook Is Said to Create Mobile Location-Tracking App (Bloomberg)… Digital First Media is Working on Paywalls, Even Though It Really Doesn’t Want To (PaidContent)… Will “Stalking Apps” Be Stopped? (Time)…

FTC Pushes Privacy Guidelines for Mobile: What It Means for Hyperlocals

Hyperlocal businesses that rely on location-based services to reach customers must consider new safeguards — such as “up-front” disclosures and “do not track” mechanisms — to stay in line with new mobile guidelines issued Friday by the Federal Trade Commission…