News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: Facebook Thrives While Twitter Dives, Snap Monetizes Placed Acquisition

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook Defies Expectations, Posting Big Growth Despite Warnings That Revenue Will Slow… Twitter User Growth Stalls, and Investors Respond in Kind… Here’s How Snap’s Placed-Assisted Attribution Abilities Will Garner Revenue…

Foursquare Analysis Highlights Looming Bubble for Boutique Fitness Studios

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Forget those New Year’s resolutions. The biggest surge in attendance at gyms and boutique fitness studios actually happens in the spring and early summer, according to a new analysis of foot traffic patterns by the data science team at Foursquare.

Alignable Rankings Show Lead Generation, Hiring Categories Primed for Disruption

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Small businesses are largely at the mercy of the online reviews published on sites like Yelp and Facebook, but now those business owners have turned the tables with some tough critiques for technology vendors in a new report published by the SMB social networking platform Alignable.

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Street Fight Daily: Google Now, ‘Times’ Debriefs on Hyperlocal

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… p style=”text-align: left;”>Google Now’s Personalized Search With Automated Results: Creepy Or The Future Of Search? (Fast Company)…

Five Things The New York Times Leaned From Its Three-Year Hyperlocal Experiment (Nieman Journalism Lab)…

Project Glass Is The Future Of Google (TechCrunch)…

Patch Local Editor is Having Fun (Romenesko)…

Placecast Expands Geo-Marketing Platform to Mobile Wallets

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Earlier this month, mobile advertising company Placecast hit 10 million active users on its ShopAlerts platform — a white-label service that helps advertisers like North Face and AT&T push geo-targeted offers to consumers who opt in. Now, the six-year-old company is expanding into the mobile wallet space with the launch of ShopAlerts Wallet this morning…

Case Study: Coffee Shop Prizes Engagement Over Customer Acquisition

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Customer engagement will always trump customer acquisition at Groundwork Coffee, an organic coffee roaster with seven outposts in the Southern California area. The company has been able to increase both the frequency of customer visits and the average ticket per visit by partnering with a digital loyalty program called FiveStars…

Street Fight Daily: NYT Ends ‘Local’ Experiment, Patch Pressure

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.‘Times’ Will End Partnerships with N.Y.U., CUNY on Hyperlocal Blogs (Capital New York)… Patch Puts Pressure on Local Editors (Romenesko) … Groupon China Venture To Merge With Tencent-Backed FTuan (Bloomberg)…

Why Loyalty Programs Are Broken — And How to Fix Them

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The customer loyalty vertical is red-hot. Startups from Silicon Valley to Chicago are working hard to innovate in this area, and, in so doing, are revolutionizing the way brick-and-mortar businesses do business. But startups need to look beyond the simple punch-card model and expand their loyalty products to include features that will effectively influence customer behavior…

Street Fight Daily: Yelp Featured, Facebook Pulls Location-Aware App

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Apple To Feature Yelp Check-Ins Within IPhone Maps App (Bloomberg)…

You Won’t Find Friends Nearby Anymore: Facebook Pulls Its Location-Aware Mobile App To Add New Friends (TechCrunch)…
An NJ Hyperlocal Net to Rival Patch, Literally (NetNewsCheck)…

As Passive Loyalty Platforms Arise, Will Merchants Miss the Check-In?

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What effect does asking less of the consumer have on the value proposition for the merchant? For companies like Foursquare whose product is built on user-generated data, a passive platform means less relevant and lower quality content. The check-in, for all its issues, created over two billion pieces of content in less than three years…

7 Social Media Strategies for Small Business Owners

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Investing in free social media tools is one of the most cost-effective things a small business owner can do to increase brand recognition and awareness, and yet fewer than 20% of SMBs currently have websites that link to popular social media networks. Here are seven tips from experts in the social media marketing industry about how business owners can take advantage of the social media tools available today…

Street Fight Daily: Facebook Highlights, Google Loosens

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.‘Find Friends Nearby’: Facebook’s New Mobile Feature For Finding People Around You… (TechCrunch)…Google loosens its limits and pricing on Maps API (Nieman Journalism Lab)… The High Value of Discount Prices (WSJ)… Google’s Maps And Commerce Group Is In A CRAZY Level Of Disarray (SAI)

Can Local Publishers Successfully Charge for Online?

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The key for small-to-medium-sized legacy publishers online is keeping it local. The New York Times has unmatched quality, The Wall Street Journal has unmatched business insight and analysis, and the Concord Monitors and The Tulsa Worlds of the industry must have unmatched local content. If so, newspaper paywalls, at least in the short term, might be more than just a “Band-Aid on a bullet wound.”