News and Analysis
Frustration With Digital Marketing Vendors Boils Over for One SMB
If it’s possible to distill the 30 million small business owners in the U.S. into a single persona, Marc Reisner strikes our columnists as a great candidate: “Marc has been disillusioned by past performance and that poor performance has understandably tarred the entire industry with the same brush.”
7 Ways That Brands Can Make Chatbot Conversations More Authentic
Chatbots are transforming the customer experience and quickly moving into new sectors — but before marketers can expect conversation-mimicking software and artificial intelligence to replace live customer service representatives, they’ll need to find ways to overcome some consumer obstacles.
Latest Posts
The Great Indoors: The Future of Indoor Location & Advertising
The “shopping experience” is something retailers have been perfecting for decades. Product placement and drive aisle concepts are designed to entice consumers and draw them to the best deals that will keep them coming back. But, what if we could take these concepts a step further with location-based marketing?
PlaceIQ Announces 4.2 Million in Funding
PlaceIQ, the hyperlocal data company that builds audience profiles for 100-meter tiles across major metropolitan centers, has raised $4.2 million dollars in series A funding. The Boulder-based company will also be relocating to New York, in order to be closer to “customers, partners, and the general ecosystem”…
Case Study: CKE’s Own Check-In App Lends Accountability and Control
How does a restaurant group with 3,000 locations spread across 43 states manage a robust location-based rewards program without sacrificing functionality or flexibility? For Brad Rosenberg, manager of digital strategy and marketing for CKE Restaurants — which owns the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s fast-food chains — the answer was to build a mobile app that could work across multiple point-of-sale systems and still provide the accountability that individual franchise owners require…
Street Fight Daily: 12.13.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Gowalla Went For $3M In Facebook Shares, And Many Investors Were Cool With That (TechCrunch)…
When It Comes to Mobile Devices, Focus Will Be on Location, Location, Location (Washington Post)…
Guardian’s n0tice Will Pay Citizen Moderators (ReadWriteWeb)…
What Works in One Local Market Won’t Necessarily Work in Another
I’ve learned, sometimes through epic failures, what works in Tracy (a suburb of Sacramento, Calif.) won’t work in Tampa. However, I’ve also learned, through epic victories, that when you harness the power of 200+ communities for a common goal great things can happen. Here are a few bits of wisdom I’ve picked up along the way.
Street Fight Daily: 12.12.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
AOL’s Patch Gets a Little Less Hyperlocal (Ad Age)…
The Gowalla-Facebook Deal Didn’t ‘Screw Over’ Gowalla’s Investors (Business Insider)…
How Can Local Businesses Structure More Effective Daily Deals? (TechCrunch)…
The Capitulation of a Social-Mobile High-Flyer
Two years ago it would have been hard to imagine Gowalla selling for anything less than a pretty penny. But a couple things have happened since then to devalue mobile apps. First, the location-based gamification juggernaut has not developed as quickly as some had predicted. Second, the competition for mindshare on handsets has magnified as many more eye-popping apps vie for attention. It’s a real street fight out there in the land of mobile apps and we will likely see more casualties, even among worthy players like Gowalla.
Local Quotables: Rick Waghorn, DJ Patil, Michael Fives, Emily Chang & More…
It’s not easy being a reporter on the daily Groupon deals beat these days. So says fatigued Emily Chang at Bloomberg West. And why did Foursquare win over Gowalla? Because if you can make it in New York, pretty much no one else stands a chance. Or, in the pith provided by one Gowalla investor on why that service lost: “Austin.”
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
Streets Ahead: Google Chat, and Instagram Reels