Shazam-ing the Super Bowl and the Marketing Value of Audio Tagging
Location-based marketing isn’t limited to mobile — it’s about how media is integrated into our lives no matter where we are. Nearly 50% of smartphone owners use their mobile device to search for product information after seeing a TV ad, according to a new study from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB).
Advice for Patch’s New Content Chief
If Patch can create an easy way for communities to report on sports events — with minimal or no effort — and then serve up that content in a relatively readable format, the upside would be huge. Also, get rid of your middle management layer. All of it. Hyperlocal works best in conditions of hyper-autonomy, without an overseer and a style enforcer…
J-Students Go Local: Inside NYU’s East Village Hyperlocal Site
As editor of The Local’s East Village blog, Daniel Maurer teaches his students about community reporting in the streets around their campus — letting them wet their feet online, and sometimes get picked up by the Times. The site is fully funded, but part of Maurer’s mission is also to remake the site into a viable business by bulking up restaurant coverage and other service features, setting the groundwork for ad sales, and potentially planning a neighborhood events series…
Local Stores Become Showrooms for Online Buying
“Showrooming” refers to the act of using local stores as showrooms for more price-competitive online purchases. Retailers can get on the right side of this trend by beating Amazon at its own data-centric game. That means launching apps — or working with those that aggregate retail feeds, such as Milo — through which personal recommendations and incentives are offered to in-store buyers…
Study Finds Local Online Ad Outlook Strong; Calls for Mobile Regulation
Marketers are becoming bullish about their current and future investment in local advertising, particularly in local online media, according to a study released this week by GMSLocal. However, members of Congress such as Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) believe that the mobile technology that could drive such growth may need stricter regulation…
As Facebook Readies IPO, Local Strategy Is in Focus
Considering that 70% of small businesses already use Facebook as a promotional tool through Pages, the company has a serious leg up on the competition. Transitioning these users into paying customers means cutting into Google’s massive market share of local ad spend, and potentially replacing the search giant as the de facto marketing tool for local businesses online…
How Should Hyperlocal Sites Handle User Information?
Publishers should be transparent on their information practices with their users. Such transparency should include what information publishers collect from their users, how the information may be used, whether publishers may share such information, what choices users have with their information, and keeping such data secure…
Twitter, Summify and the New Local Relevance Layer
We’ve already seen on Street Fight how Flipboard can be turned into a hyperlocal news feed. And that’s exactly where I see possibilities or Twitter in Summify. Flipboard is an amazing presentation layer, but following raw Twitter streams via lists and then dumping them into Flipboard does not surmount the signal-to-noise problem. Drop Summify into the mix and things get more interesting. Further, add the ability to more easily build lists based on geolocation of the tweets and you might actually have a very interesting hyperlocal content stream with huge implications for local businesses…
PODCAST: This Week in Location-Based Marketing: NearBuy, Urban Airship
In this week’s episode, hosts Rob Woodbridge and Asif Khan talk focus on some timely stories from some of the companies that made a splash at the recent Big Show conference in New York. Topics include cloud analytics company NearBuy, geofencing service LocalPoint and Foursquare’s foray into the menu business…
Following Jerry Yang’s Exit, Where Is Yahoo’s Local Strategy Headed?
Yahoo may be a lot closer to a viable mocal strategy than people are giving it credit for and the incoming CEO may actually have a great canvas to prove the naysayers wrong and recast the portal as a more nimble player that squarely straddles the old and the new Internet with equal facility…
Will Microlocal Work for Community Bulletin Board Sites?
Everyblock and Nextdoor may need to go where the local conversational action is, Facebook. For example, microlocals could partner with Facebook and allow their subscribers to create a Facebook group for their neighborhood with all the bells and whistles (classifieds, recommendations, events listings) associated with their web application…
IAB Counsel: Push to Regulate Online Ads May Lose Traction
Hyperlocal news publishers have a better chance to prosper with targeted display advertising that is self-regulated, according to Mike Zaneis, the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s General Counsel and Senior Vice President of public policy. Industry groups like the IAB fear government regulations may slow growth for the online industry…
Bob Garfield Is Wrong About Hyperlocal — Here’s Why
I’d venture online news will enjoy more significant changes in the next decade than it has in the last — and that’s saying something, considering that the last decade saw the rise of the broadband Internet and smartphone saturation. Ironically, the very same week that Garfield nailed the coffin shut on hyperlocal, we read about how NPR used localized Facebook targeting to jack traffic on some of its articles…