News and Analysis
Foursquare Analysis Shows Where Customers Go When Retailers Close
Using both explicit and passive location data from its Foursquare City Guide and Foursquare Swarm apps and websites, the company analyzed consumer visits at Macy’s and Kmart locations that closed in 2016. Foursquare also looked at foot traffic at competing retail stores around the same time period.
Google Analytics for Brick-and-Mortar? Spatially Targets Where to Set Up Shop
Hillit Meidar-Alfi, the company’s founder and CEO says the service “is building the most powerful platform for location search and analytics with applications for small and medium businesses, marketing technologies, ecommerce, real estate, and more. Businesses using location analytics will have a significant competitive advantage over those that do not.”
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Case Study: The Difficulty of Turning Coupon Buyers Into Customers
Brooke Randazzo Eggert, the owner of r3mg, a creative boutique that specializes in photography and invitation design in Oak Park, Ill., has experienced the highs and lows of hyperlocal marketing. She tells Street Fight that she’s had more success gaining loyal, local customers by advertising on community news sites and blogs than by running group coupons on sites like Mamapedia and Gleeday…
Street Fight Daily: 06.07.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups… Groupon is joining two marketing-services and analytics firms to get deeper into the traditional grocery coupon business with a test today. In a first for Groupon, today’s deal in Massachusetts uses supermarket loyalty cards to conduct the transaction. (AdAge)…
“Augmented reality” apps put a layer of locally relevant data on top of the scene around you. But who owns the rights to ad space within augmented reality platforms? Currently there’s nothing keeping multiple brands from owning the same space. (Mashable)…
Foursquare, Groupon, and the Market-Making Problem
With Groupon’s filing to go public last week, there has been even more debate over the two-sided market strategy of consumers and local merchants. Another business that has focused on this approach is Foursquare. Is the window of opportunity closing for Foursquare to become the breakout success it could be? The answer depends on how much the company is willing to change its DNA to serve both sides of their market — and perhaps take a few lessons on self-serve and average selling price from Groupon…
B-Town Blog’s Schaefer: Hyperlocal Means Being ‘On the Ground’
Scott Schaefer is the founder, publisher and editor of B-Town Blog, in Burien, Wash., which was named the best hyperlocal news Web site by the Society of Professional Journalists Pacific Northwest Chapter. B-Town Blog, one of six hyperlocal content sites operated by Schaefer’s LOL Dudez, aims to “report news from a ‘location-based’ perspective.” Schaefer recently spoke to Street Fight about how that “location-based” principle guides everything the site does.
Street Fight Daily: 06.06.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups… 
If Groupon slams the brakes on marketing costs, the value of hyperlocal online inventory will fall after a recent surge in demand, writes Jeff Bercovici. On the other hand, if Groupon is wrong and it has to keep spending to attract customers the way it is now, then it will likely never be profitable and those ad dollars will go away anyway. (Forbes)… Since Groupon filed its S-1 on Thursday, there have been hundreds of negative articles written about Groupon. While some of the concerns brought up about Groupon are legitimate, many of them are unfounded, writes Vinicius Vacanti. (Yipit Blog)…
Main Street’s Need for Speed
The single-best deal, assertion, investment or other strategy this week.
Who: Main Street Connect
Why: For its plan to scale up to 6,000 hyperlocal sites across the country in a few short years
Advertisers typically want to reach more than a single town. If independent community news site proprietors are making good dough, why aren’t they propagating, sharing their news prowess with neighbor towns? That’s what we’ll be doing with our profits — reinvest, reinvest, reinvest, so our products and processes get more and more excellent.. — Carll Tucker, Main Street Connect CEO…
Street Fight Daily: 06.03.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups…
In its long awaited S-1, it’s clear that Groupon has impressive topline growth. However, when looking at it’s oldest markets, it appears that their business model is deteriorating. (Yipit Blog)…
Several more perspectives on the Groupon IPO: a Twitter debate over the company’s doomed-ness, a look at who owns what stake in the company, a warning to investors by Andrew Mason, and some red flags for potential investors. (GigaOm, TechCrunch, PaidContent, Business Insider)…
How Not to Be Yelp: Foodspotting
I spent the last column questioning the veracity of Yelp reviews and doubting the future of user-generated content (UGC) on that most trafficked of UGC sites. In fact, I was probably so harsh that it may have seemed like I hate UGC entirely. I don’t. I just hate UGC that is easily gamed and encourages the worst aspects of human nature – fawning frippery or obnoxious snarkiness. Further, a hyper-local reviews site that allows anyone to post a review, even from the comfort of their body-shop cube in Bangalore, makes it hard to trust the information proffered…
Groupon to Go Public — And Then Where?
The point of the company that eventually became Groupon was initially to inspire group action around a political or social cause. It was called ThePoint.
The point of Groupon… well, that may yet to be determined. The company, which filed an S-1 today with the Securities & Exchange Commission for a $750 million initial public offering, is known as a group-buying firm offering deep discounts on everything from hair removal to horse rides, complete with clever copy in each offer. It has seen a meteoric rise in revenue, earning $644 million in the first quarter of 2011 alone, up from $713.3 million in all of 2010. It has 83 million subscribers across 43 countries. And, as CEO Andrew Mason revealed this week at AllThingsD’s D9 conference, about half of its 8,000 workforce is in sales. Groupon has some serious feet on the streets…
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