Street Fight Daily: 09.27.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
September can’t end soon enough for Groupon. The month brought a string of staff departures, SEC spats and the indefinite shelving of the company’s long-awaited IPO. Now a second class of employees has filed a class action against Groupon over unpaid overtime. (PaidContent)…
Facebook is offering up to $10 million in free advertising to small businesses in the middle of slight changes to how the social networking site allows brands and consumers to interact on its Pages. (ReadWriteWeb)…
Nielsen’s Undercount of News: Why the Numbers Don’t Add Up
Social networking has become the 800-pound gorilla of the Internet. That’s what Nielsen is trumpeting in a new report. And news, it says, is a tiny mouse.
Or is it?
Nielsen’s Social Media Report says news accounts for just 2.6% of Internet use compared to 22.5% for social networking and blogs. But that news number doesn’t hold up under examination…
Sonar CEO: ‘Location Is Reaching an Inflection Point’
“We spent the last five years uploading our lives to the Internet – our likes, preferences, activities and so on,” says Brett Martin. “Now, we are downloading that information and spreading it over the suitable world. So there is a gold rush of applications which are working to help navigate that data in a physical context.”
Facebook’s Life After Deals
The best or biggest deal, assertion, investment or other strategy this week. Who: Facebook What: Taking another approach to location-based services Just a week after it said it would abandon its location-based service Places in favor of a new strategy, Facebook announced that it was getting out of the deals business. Facebook Deals was only around […]
Street Fight Daily: 08.31.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
“The golden age of daily deals, led by the unprecedented growth of Groupon, seems to be coming to its end,” writes Ben Parr. “That’s not to say daily deals won’t be sticking around for a long time — clearly there is a business in it — but when two major players withdraw from the space and its biggest player experiences a 50% traffic decline, it’s a clear sign that the daily deals market is no longer in its heyday.” (Mashable)…
A little over a year after Gannett and Yahoo teamed up on local ads sales primarily for the publisher’s 81 community newspapers, the two are extending their partnership to include all of Gannett’s 19 local TV stations. (PaidContent)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.30.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Local reviews network Yelp is preparing to cut staff and “scale back” its one-year-old Yelp Deals service. About 15 sales staff currently working on the Deals service are getting redeployed to other parts of the organization; another 15 will remain working on the service, and the number of offers sent to users is “unlikely to grow.” (PaidContent)…
By 2015, small and medium-sized businesses will spend only 30% of their marketing budgets on traditional media with the rest going to digital and online media, according to BIA/Kelsey. (NetNewsCheck)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.29.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Facebook is getting out of the daily deals business after four months of testing, a move that may ease some competitive pressure on industry leaders Groupon and LivingSocial. (Reuters)…
The global location-based advertising market will reach $12.8 billion by 2017, according to a new report by Global Industry Analysts. (Press Release)…
Facebook Replaces Places
Just a year after launching its location-based service, Places, which let people use their mobile devices to post their whereabouts to their profiles, Facebook is killing it off. FourSquare and its ilk shouldn’t be too psyched. While Places wasn’t a hit—did you use it?—Facebook is planning to include location features all over the, er, place. Users can add locations to photos and to their profiles, and do it from smartphone, desktop and everything in between. Considering that plenty of people are complaining about social networking overload, that’s smart
Street Fight Daily: 08.23.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Facebook is killing off Places. To be clear, Facebook is not ducking out of the location game itself. In fact, you could say that they’re doubling-down on it. But they are moving away from the game that the “check-in” services have been playing. (TechCrunch)…
Group Commerce, which sells a software platform to let publishers host their own daily deal applications, has acquired geo-location startup Socialight. The Socialight team and technology will be put toward fleshing out Group Commerce’s mobile strategy. (GigaOm)…
Street Fight Daily: 05.26.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups… Facebook’s local chief Emily White says that local businesses should post to their wall three times per week. She also talks about the network’s push for check-in deals on Facebook Places. (USA Today)… Google is keenly interested in location data, and it seems like its work in maps and location is paying off, particularly on mobile phones. Google Maps on mobile devices, which makes up about 40 percent of all Google Maps usage, is on pace to eclipse desktop usage for the first time next month. (GigaOm)…
Case Study: Restaurant Chain Builds Loyalty With Check-In Discounts
Scott Wise is the president and CEO of A Pots & Pans Production, a management company that runs seven restaurants in Indiana. He says businesses need to approach online media like they would a cocktail party, and that it’s better to take notes and learn from what other people are saying than to “go in screaming, drinking, and trying to enter everyone’s conversation.”
Street Fight Daily: 05.17.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Local directory company Yell Group has set a July timetable for announcing the conclusion of its strategic review, which it set in motion early this year in the face of continuing declines at its printed Yellow Pages business. (Paid Content)…
Groupon and Scvngr’s moves last week demonstrated how daily deals and geo-social are on a collision course. Here’s why Facebook might be a step behind other marketing options for deals and geo-social. (Clickz)…
Study: FB ‘Likes’ Driving Buzz for Local Biz
The Facebook “like” button, which has been around for just over a year, has already become an important cultural phenomenon. A couple of months ago, a study by Yahoo Labs’ Yury Lifshits looked at how “likes” affect traffic to news stories by reinforcing memes, making the most popular content even more popular as it is passed around.
Street Fight Daily: 04.12.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.…
Patch’s local news module widget is hardly a new idea, but it’s one that few local newspaper companies have made work, despite the economy of its potential costs and benefits. Will Patch leapfrog newspaper sites with this old-is-new innovation? (Newsonomics)…
Twitter’s Local Trends feature has now expanded to 70 more places. This seems likely to foreshadow a future when advertisers will be able to purchase trending topics on a local level. (ReadWriteWeb)…
Four unsolicited lessons that Groupon’s Andrew Mason should take from what Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg just did in China. (Forbes)…
American Express Gets Into Daily Deals
Who isn’t getting into the daily deals space? That’s becoming a tough question to answer. The latest company to get on the bandwagon in AmEx–and it looks like they have some very intelligent twists on the concept that will help convince customers to spend more.