News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Facebook Recommends Local Businesses, Google Maps Supercharges Location Sharing
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook Tests an Enhanced Local Search and Discovery Feature Offering Business Suggestions… Google Maps Supercharges Location Sharing, Begins Drooling Over Your Data… AT&T, Verizon Pull Ads from Google Over ‘Hate’ Videos…
6 Ways Retailers Are Using Messaging Apps for Marketing
Popular consumer-facing apps like Viber, Kik, and WhatsApp, are pushing hard to become known as more than just messaging services, and one of the ways they’re doing that is by beefing up their social commerce capabilities. Here are six examples of innovative ways that retailers are using them to market to consumers.
Latest Posts
Hyperlocal Publishers Form a Trade Group
A group of 22 local online news organizations have announced that they are forming a trade association. The parameters and potential activity of the association remain largely undefined, but the group includes some of the better-known names in indie hyperlocal publishing, including The Batavian’s Howard Owens, Baristanet’s Debra Gallant, and Oakland Local’s Susan Mernit…
Street Fight Daily: 10.03.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Loopt has been allowed its first patent, and it could be a big one. In layman’s terms, the patent describes using your location to display relevant ads and offers on top of a map, as an interstitial, or as a text ad — another claim also discusses displaying where your friends are on the same map. (TechCrunch)…
A basic contradiction at the heart of the daily deals industry on the Internet has become apparent. Consumers have been told: You will never pay full price again. The merchants were hearing: You are going to get new customers who will stick around and pay full price. Disappointment was inevitable. (New York Times)…
Bing is Good for Daily Deals — And Deal Buyers
A few weeks back Microsoft’s Bing! was the first search engine to roll out a daily deals search feature. The deals feed includes 200,000 offers perusable by geography and timing. It’s impressive. The Bing! Team has been aggressive about quickly putting in place customer-centric features like enhanced travel search and visual shopping search that address the way we live now with useful tools. This is the logical extension of the daily deal aggregation game, where the big fellas in the online search biz take the lead. And it both validates and improve my deal experience…
Street Fight Daily: 09.30.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
AOL appears to be preparing us for some kind of neighborhood-based social network built around MapQuest. It has registered a bunch of domains this year that all point to a page that says something called “mqVibe” is coming soon. (ReadWriteWeb)…
Facebook Deals official last day was Sunday, but sources say the company’s withdrawal is not a bad omen for the industry. All of the companies in the space, including newbie Google, are rapidly creating mobile solutions that will recognize when people are close to a deal and allow them to redeem it immediately. (AllThingsD)…
Local Quotables: Susan Mernit, Steve Buttry, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, and more
A weekly roundup of thoughts about and around the hyperlocal industry.
Susan Mernit chastises the ONA; a Groupon manager says businesses don’t understand their product; SimpleGeo’s Jeffrey Kalmikoff expresses doubts about Facebook’s new interface; and Hearsay Local’s Clara Shih talks about social networks in the organization. More:
Digital Pioneer David Cohn: Hyperlocals Need Passion AND Revenue
David Cohn, founder of Spot.us, a nonprofit pioneer in community-funded reporting, has been hired by the UC/Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism to help develop a sustainable business model for hyperlocals. He will run three Ford Foundation-funded, student-staffed hyperlocals in the Bay Area, with the aim of making them self-supporting. As he began his new assignment, […]
Case Study: Portland Salon Uses Scoutmob to Increase Exposure, Not Financial Risk
As a new business owner in Portland, Ore., Robin Carlisle has relied heavily on local press and word-of-mouth to promote her salon, Holiday Hair Studio. She initially shied away from daily deal promotions out of fear that an influx of customers would overwhelm her studio, located inside a vintage trailer. She ultimately decided to give Scoutmob a try this past July, in part because the company was new to Portland . Carlisle felt confident that she would be able to use the promotion for exposure without taking on more financial risk than she could handle…
Street Fight Daily: 09.29.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
In an effort to diversify revenue and maintain its rapid growth, Groupon is fast evolving its business model. Recently Groupon deals have gone mobile, real-time, and location aware. Now the company has launched “Groupon Goods,” an ecommerce product that marks the company’s most aggressive departure away from its core daily deal offers. (CNET)…
Daily deals service Signpost is growing its sales force at a rapid pace that could surpass competitors like Groupon and LivingSocial by the end of the year, according to the company’s CEO, Stuart Wall. Signpost employs local contractors, called Deal Scouts, to sign up local businesses for the service. (SocialBeat)…
Patch Pushback: Warren Webster Fires Back Amid Analysis and Criticism
Rick Robinson gets the lowdown from Patch’s president about why they’ve lost sales execs; the network’s plans to “stand on its own financially; and a reply to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s suggestion that Patch could possibly, at some point, be considered for a sale. He also comments on the HuffPo-Patch dynamic, neither confirming nor denying that Patch will merge editorial operations with HuffPo.
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Streets Ahead: Google Chat, and Instagram Reels