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7 Fresh Ways SMBs Are Using Social Media for Marketing
In order for business owners to maximize the impact of their expanded social media budgets, they need to think outside the box and try new tactics for reaching consumers online. Here are seven examples of fresh new ways that small and mid-size businesses can use social media for marketing in 2017.
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Patch’s Main Problem? Paltry Pay
When I was working at AOL a few years back, the recruiter for Patch.com came through the West Coast offices and I spoke to her a bit about building out the fast-growing hyperlocal news blog company that is something of a bet-the-future venture for AOL chief Tim Armstrong and company (along with HuffPo). The recruiter was very nice and gave me the pitch so I could pass on to friends. Included in the pitch was a plug for the compensation: Top regional editors were going to make $70k or so. Local Patch bloggers would make a whole lot less. This seemed like a great wage – for North Dakota. In the Bay Area? $70k is just above entry level for lots of tech sector jobs. Which led me to wonder, would Patch be able to pull in quality people to make the network worthwhile?..
The F.C.C. Solution for Community News is So Last Century
The new and much-quoted F.C.C. report on “Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a BroadBand Age” is massive and well written, and its authors did their due diligence by holding workshops whose testimony from an array of media experts fills 711 pages. But the report’s back-to-the-future prescription for community news in the digital era is a big disappointment.
The report’s most fraught conclusion, and the one getting the most published attention:
“…in many communities, we now face a shortage of local, professional, accountability reporting. This is likely to lead to the kinds of problems that are, not surprisingly, associated with a lack of accountability—more government waste, more local corruption, less effective schools, and other serious community problems. The independent watchdog function that the Founding Fathers envisioned for journalism—going so far as to call it crucial to a healthy democracy—is in some cases at risk at the local level.”
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Street Fight Daily: 06.10.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… The FCC has produced a 478-page report on the state of the media in the digital age, and — no surprise — the report has found a big gap in watchdog and investigative journalism, and the local news hole hasn’t been filled by the proliferation of online news and non-profits. At the same time, the report doesn’t support any major government intiative to correct the situation. (Paid Content, Block-By Block, Nieman Lab, Romenesko/Patch)… Increasingly, location is getting baked into regular web pages as well. Fwix is taking its hyperlocal places database and exposing it to web sites in a novel way. “Our goal is to index the Web by location,” says Fwix CEO Darian Shirazi. (TechCrunch)…
Why Hyperlocals Are Missing Out on Engagement
“Engagement,” just about everyone agrees, is a must, especially for news websites, most especially hyperlocals. But engagement metrics for news – even allowing for sometimes wildly conflicting numbers produced from different methodologies – are mostly grim. The average Facebook user spends a half hour-plus on that paragon of digital engagement. News sites get minutes that can be counted on one hand. Taking into account murky Web analytics, only a fraction of that time – about three minutes for most hyperlocal news sites, according to Alexa – represents engagement where the site has captured the user’s undivided attention…
Realtor Reaches Clients Through SEO Marketing, Hyperlocal Blogs
Realtor Karen Benvin Ransom’s listings have moved far beyond the newspaper classifieds. With a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a personal Web site, and a series of articles she’s written about her local community online, Ransom has honed in on the exact sites and search terms that her clients at Houlihan Lawrence are using to shop for homes in Westchester County, N.Y.
Street Fight Daily: 06.09.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups… One Patch salesperson – candidly self-described as a “disgruntled employee” — said that”people in the sales teams that are successful have to sell the product to an ignorant lot of small business owners that can’t differentiate between branding and performance-driving results. When it gets down to paying the editors, paying the sales staff, paying the management and the requisite expenses that go along with that, the numbers just do not compute.” (Business Insider)… A new forecast from eMarketer puts online ad spending at $31.3 billion this year, up 20 percent. That is double the 10.5 percent growth rate it put out last December for 2011. The new forecast shows online ad spending reaching nearly $50 billion in 2015. (TechCrunch)…
Eversave’s Doyle: Creating Deals That Aren’t ‘One-and-Done’
Eversave, the third-largest online daily deals company in the U.S. (behind Groupon and LivingSocial), can trace its online deals business back over a decade, when its parent, Prospectiv, launched a service offering printable online coupons. The company’s daily deals service, which launched last year, runs offers in 17 different cities around the country, mixing local-specific deals with discounts on larger national brands aimed specifically at women…
Location Obsessives Beware: You May Never Leave Your Screens
For years I’ve been fascinated with digitized maps and the spell they can cast. To see where we’re going, where we’ve been, where we could have gone — to become found when lost and undiscoverable when seeking silence – digital maps lead us to all these things, and away from some. The perfect companion. And since the map interface has jumped from atoms to bits, lighting up pixels of core applications on nearly every device stamped out by innovators of sleek glass and steel to copycats of affordable utility (just about all phones now carry mapping apps), almost everyone can play along…
Street Fight Daily: 06.08.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Foursquare has teamed with 7-11 to offer a trip to suborbital space as a prize in an online contest. While the US spaceflight program is getting its budget shut down, there’s something rather poetic about this opportunity. (ReadWriteWeb)…
A study of U.K. salon owners found that only 1% of Groupon buyers go on to become regular customers. Moreover, Groupon’s churn rate could be as high as 90%. (Dylan Collins)…
Police Scanners and Speculation = Necessary Hyperlocal Journalism?
A lively discussion erupted yesterday in the comments section of Street Fight’s interview with B-Town Blog’s Scott Schaefer. At issue: Schaefer’s suggestion that sites did their communities disservice by reporting on rumors and information that comes over the transom via unconfirmed rumors and police scanner reports… Among those taking issue were The Batavian’s Howard Owens, who wrote: “When you don’t do scanner reports, you’re missing a key to audience growth and retention, and I think abandoning your ethical obligation as a real-time news service to keep readers fully informed.”…
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