News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Online Brands Go Brick-and-Mortar, Voice-Assistant Arms Race Escalates
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Why E-Commerce Brands Are Opening Brick-and-Mortar Stores… Amazon and Apple Escalate Battle of Virtual Assistants… Tech Companies, Led by Amazon, Spend More Than Any Other U.S. Companies on R&D…
GTCR Acquires Majority Stake in Simpli.fi
GTCR, a Chicago-based private equity firm, has acquired a majority stake in Simpli.fi, a programmatic advertising platform that helps brands master local marketing at scale. The Simpli.fi management team, headed up by co-founders Frost Prioleau and Paul Harrison, will remain in charge of the company’s operations.
At Liftoff, a Classic Formula for Company Culture
It’s never too early to be intentional about establishing and promoting the key values you want your team to emulate, says Liftoff’s CEO Mark Ellis. It provides a set of criteria against which to assess candidates from a cultural fit perspective, as well as a rationale for promoting certain employee behaviors and discouraging others.
Latest Posts
Can Mobile Technology Fix What’s Broken in Loyalty Programs?
New mobile and in-store technology allows merchants to utilize relatively low-cost devices, such as an iPhone or an iPad, to take advantage of data-driven programs that do more than simply count down the punches until a customer’s next free sandwich. Here are two ways in which mobile tech has improved loyalty programs for small merchants…
6 Strategies for Promoting New Mobile Apps
Businesses large and small are increasingly relying on branded apps to promote their products and engage customers on their mobile devices. To find out what marketers, publishers, and brands should do to promote these apps, we turned to the experts. Here are six tips that anyone can use to promote a new mobile app without spending millions in the process…
Echoer App Compiles and Curates Real-Time Feedback About Locations
Four months after its wide launch in iOS, the crowdsourcing, location-based service app Echoer has announced an expansion into Android and a new content partner program with more than 500 media, blogger and event partners. Street Fight caught up with Daniel Cowen, Echoer’s co-founder and CEO, to discuss the app’s progression, the difficulties associated with continually generating real-time content, and how it distinguishes itself from reviews sites like Yelp…
Case Study: Taco Del Mar Sends Time-Specific Offers With Pirq
As the owner of eight Taco Del Mar franchises in Washington and Oregon, Jeff Masterjohn has to be careful that the promotions he runs don’t interfere with any campaigns being handled by his corporate bosses or fellow franchisees. One way that he has been able to do this is by running day-parted discounts with Pirq, a mobile deals platform that consumers use to find geo-targeted offers on their smartphones…
LBS Marketing Spotlight: Restaurants
Restaurants that want to stay ahead of the curve need to utilize their mobile apps as a source for offering programs for loyal diners. According to the National Restaurant Association’s Restaurant Industry Forecast, 57% of adult consumers are more likely to choose restaurants that offer a loyalty rewards program. Meanwhile, 40% are using smartphones to look at menus and order take-out…
Street Fight Daily: Mobile Companies Ally, Should Yahoo Buy Foursquare?
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Nokia, Samsung, Sony Mobile and Others Form In-Location Alliance, Seek to Boost Indoor Positioning Technologies (TheNextWeb)… Will Foursquare Be Marissa Mayer’s First Big Acquisition At Yahoo? (Marketing Land)… Groupon’s New Operations Czar Grasps Shaky Helm (Chicago Tribune)…
As Social Media Hype Wanes, Appeal of Hyperlocal Remains
While social media is here to stay, the market shares a lot more with the online advertising segment than, say, the SaaS subscription business. Social media is only as sticky as its user base and only as attractive as it is fresh. I am sure that there are real benefits to tapping a social graph for sales. But I am becoming more sure that those benefits are incremental and evolutionary, rather than a step change…
The Outsourcing of Hyperlocal Journalism Is Inevitable
My conviction in the power of collaborative “glocal” journalism has not been swayed by the Journatic debacle. Properly managed, outsourcing some newsroom functions can be incredibly cost-effective and can contribute to the quality of a publication’s editorial content. Badly executed, outsourcing can become a plague that infects a publication’s journalistic integrity.
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