News and Analysis
6 Ways Merchants Can Prepare For the Rise in Voice Search
Forty-two percent of U.S. consumers already say they’ve used voice assistants in the last three months, and industry forecasters are predicting that 20% of all user interactions with smartphones will take place through these assistants within the next three years. Here are six ways that local businesses can start preparing.
Street Fight Daily: Retailers Emphasize Mobile Web Over Apps, Verizon and Yahoo Close Revised Deal
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… The Mobile Web is Quietly Killing Off Retail Apps… Why Verizon Decided to Still Buy Yahoo After Big Data Breaches… ‘More Options and Misunderstandings’: Media Buying on Snapchat Confuses Advertisers…
Latest Posts
Inside National Public Radio’s Play for Local Online
I’ve been writing about large media brands and their hyperlocal efforts for the past few weeks, looking at Gannett, Tribune and PBS for example. Balancing things out with another not-exactly-for-profit property, I recently asked NPR’s digital services GM, Robert Kempf, to talk about his organization’s forays into hyperlocal…
Street Fight Daily: 06.29.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
A few months after being named COO of the Huffington Post Media Group, Jon Brod’s responsibilities are being narrowed to focus on running AOL’s Patch network of hyperlocal sites. Brod co-founded Patch with Tim Armstrong and was CEO when it was acquired in 2009. (Paid Content)…
Location-based service advertising will grow to over one-third of all mobile advertising in four years. By 2015, location-based advertising will be $6.2 billion, according to Pyramid Research. (MediaPost)…
Making Deals More Relevant
In considering the future of daily deals and group buying, one theme that keeps coming up is the idea that increasingly sophisticated targeting (and thus relevance) will, over time, make the deals proposition better for both merchants and consumers. As with traditional advertising, the better targeted a deal is for a consumer’s preferences and geo-location, the better value the promotion is for the merchant who runs it…
ReachDeals’s Razgaitis: Mobile Is a ‘Key Catalyst’ in Deals Space
DealOn, a group buying company that launched in late 2009, was always meant to be more than just a Groupon clone. The site offered deals, but it also had plans for a white label deals solution for publishers as well as an “offer exchange” which sought to “empower the deals ecosystem,” according to Rich Razgaitis, who was the company’s CEO until it was acquired by ReachLocal last year…
Case Study: Optometrist Uses Foursquare to Court Tech-Savvy Patients
For self-avowed tech junkie Nathan Bonilla-Warford, Foursquare is more than just a tool for discovering new restaurants and keeping up with friends. It’s also one of the primary ways he markets his business as an optometrist and the owner of Bright Eyes Family Vision Care in Tampa, Florida…
Street Fight Daily: 06.28.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
“How can LivingSocial beat a better-funded competitor with more name recognition who has a 22-country head start on them?” asks Sarah Lacy. “Ironically by moving more slowly, throwing around less cash and being smarter with local hires, not pricey consultants and MBAs.” (TechCrunch)…
“You can’t just jump into a crowded local news market with a product that’s about as good as the existing ones,” writes Erik Wemple. “Even marginally better won’t get the job done. It’s got to be so much better that you can eat the lunch of legacy outlets.” (Washington Post)…
TIPPR: Quality of Audience Is What Matters in the Deals Space
In the wake of Groupon’s recent S1 and the subsequent wave of criticism that has been aimed at the daily deals giant, deals platform and technology providers like Tippr are stepping in to the fray with new models to power group buying. Street Fight caught up with Tippr’s COO Samy Aboel-Nil at DIGIDAY: LOCAL last week to discuss how the company’s Powered by Tippr is hoping to change the game…
Local News Isn’t Local Enough for Meporter’s Andy Leff
Meporter, a citizen journalism platform for mobile phones that was launched in May, combines the check-in function of Foursquare with crowdsourcing and old-fashioned reporting. Using the app, journalists of all stripes can check in to a location or an event and then share their on-the-fly news report with the world at large…
Street Fight Daily: 06.27.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
LivingSocial seems to be following Groupon’s lead in acquiring local daily deal sites to serve as a foundation for discount distribution on a global scale. (TechCrunch)…
Could Offers become a massive new revenue stream for Google — the “second huge growth engine” that Google has long searched for in vain? SAI spoke to reps of merchants who have signed on to offer Google Offers in New York, as well as Google’s Eric Rosenblum, the lead engineer on Offers, and Google spokesperson Nate Tyler. (Silicon Alley Insider)…
Hyperlocal’s Automated Future
At the hyperlocal level, the value is in the information, not the presentation. You read the local to learn, above all, what’s going on in your town or your nabe. If a computer can help collate and present that to you in a more digestible fashion, more the better. Will this kill the community journalist? I doubt it. The journalist still must be present.
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
Why TV Remains the Heartbeat of Local Connection