Street Fight Daily: Clinkle Revealed, Ride-Sharing War Intensifies
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Clinkle Revealed: Here’s What the Embattled Startup Is (And Isn’t) Building (Recode)… Ride-Sharing Price War Intensifies With Lyft’s ‘Happy Hour’ Discount (Wall Street Journal)… LivingSocial to Prioritize Growth Over Profitability, New Chief Revenue Officer Says (Washington Post)…
Street Fight Daily: Groupon’s Next Big Thing, Yelp Ad Growth Lifts Stock
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.… Groupon’s Next Big Thing? Helping Mom-and-Pop Shops Unload Extra Inventory. (Recode)… Yelp Reaches High as JPMorgan Says Ad Growth Will Lift Stock (Bloomberg)… Will (Local) Q&A App Jelly Succeed Where Others Have Failed? (Screenwerk)…
Street Fight’s 10 Most Popular Stories From 2013
On this last day of 2013, here’s a look back at some of the Street Fight stories that really piqued your interest this year (at least as far as page views go). We’re grateful for all of your support this past year, and we look forward to bringing you more great content, research, and events about sustainable hyperlocal business models in 2014…
Street Fight Daily: Apple Buys Hyperlocal Startups, Booze Brands Align With Taxi Apps
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.… Apple Acquired Mapping Firm BroadMap, Location-infused Evernote Competitor Catch (9to5 Mac)… Free Rides: Booze Brands Align With Transportation Apps (AdAge)… Foursquare’s New Money Means Facebook Isn’t Everything (Wired)…
Street Fight Daily: Patch Not Dead Yet, Amazon Buys Square Competitor
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.… Amid Postmortems, AOL Says Patch Is Still Alive (Businessweek)… Amazon Reportedly Buys Mobile Payments Startup Gopago, Working On An ‘Ambitious’ New Project (TechCrunch)… Customers Out in the Cold Balk at Uber Surge Pricing (New York Times)…
Case Study: Lenovo Uses Local Search Tactics to Drive In-Store Sales
How does a brand without its own brick-and-mortar stores drive offline sales? That’s the question that Donna Bedford and Rick Medeiros have struggled with as they continue to develop Lenovo’s local search strategy. “We’re starting to think, how do we start becoming more hyperlocal? We’re a global company, so how do we develop that hyperlocal presence and really try to make sure that people clearly know who we are,” Medeiros says…
Street Fight Daily: Uber’s Regulator Fight Continues, Google’s New Take On Self-Service
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Why Is Uber Fighting a Regulatory Battle That It Already Won? (AllThingsD)… Google Updates Its Self-Service Offers Tool (TheNextWeb)… Square’s Credit Card Payments Are Great, But Here’s What The Company Actually Does Best (Business Insider)…
Street Fight Daily: Fake Yelp Reviews Rise, Yahoo Gives Maps A Facelift
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… A Whopping 20% Of Yelp Reviews Are Fake (MarketWatch)… Surprise: Yahoo Maps Gets A Facelift, New Features (SearchEngineLand)… Hyperlocal Power: Urban Compass Raises $20M At A $150M Valuation; Adds Advance Publications And Marc Benioff As Investors (TechCrunch)…
Street Fight Daily: Google Wallet Comes To iOS, Groupon’s Monster Rally
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Google Wallet Finally Comes to the iPhone (With a Big Asterisk) (AllThingsD)… Three Reasons Groupon’s Monster Rally Will Continue (Wall Street Journal)… Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman Ignored Advice From Elon Musk and Peter Thiel And Succeeded Anyway (CNNMoney)…
Calculating the ROI of Local Search Campaigns
How can we calculate just how much return a given business can expect on the investment of time, money, or both into a local search campaign? For many business owners, it’s that type of dollars and cents calculation that will drive them to decide whether or not to move forward with a campaign. Other metrics are important but ultimately secondary to the bottom line…
How Local Search Looks to the Rest of Us
It seems like many recent conversations, webinars, articles, and studies have pointed to the same conclusion: local search as an industry is insufficiently aware of how its products are actually used by consumers and small businesses. Many of the solutions put forward by consumer-facing local publishers and by business-facing services overestimate our appetite for new products and the amount of time and energy we want to spend using online tools…
Street Fight Daily: AT&T Sells Location Data, Square Partners With Apple Retail
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… AT&T Will Start Anonymously Selling Your Location Data To Marketers (Business Insider)…. Apple Retail, Square Partner To Sell iPad-based Square Stand (9To5 Mac)… LSA: 10.5 Billion Print + IYP ‘Refences’ in 2012 (Screenwerk)…
The Good and Bad of Local Discovery on Our Summer Road Trip
Greetings from a summer road trip in the Pacific Northwest. Amid games of twenty questions and alphabet animals, we have faced the typical needs of the traveler: shelter, food, gas, and fun. Naturally, we’ve turned to local search, just like the other 31% of leisure travelers (up from 18% in 2010). I’ve written mainly about local search on the homefront and travel is another kind of use case entirely, one that in many ways has been “solved” by existing services — but has it? In our experience, you often have to be creative to get what you need…
Street Fight Daily: Revel Raises $10M; LevelUp: We’re ‘Android,’ Square is ‘Apple’
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Revel Systems Raises $10.1M To Help It Grow iPad Point-Of-Sale Business (TechCrunch)… LevelUp: We’re ‘Android,’ Square is ‘Apple’ (Local Onliner)… Why Angie’s List Hires an Auditor to Read its Business Reviews (Bloomberg)…
Street Fight Daily: Facebook Challenges Yelp, Foursquare Rethinks the Web
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Facebook Challenges Yelp With Mobile Pages Redesign Featuring Actions, Local Biz Details, And Ratings (TechCrunch)… Foursquare Revamps Business Pages to Take on Yelp as Web Visitors Hit 50 Million per Month (Verge)… Can Yelp Hold Off Foursquare and Facebook? (Screenwerk)…
When Will The Last Yellow Pages Book be Printed?
With the rise of local search sites, social media, and mobile directories, the physical Yellow Pages books delivered to consumers’ doors — long a staple of local marketing — are quickly becoming obsolete. We asked a few folks from around the industry what date they would envision for the directories’ final print run…
Managing Local Presence on Mobile Devices: A Developing Challenge
The continued strong growth of mobile local search combined with the high value of mobile customers indicates a shift in attention is required on the part of local search publishers, in order to make it easier for businesses to manage their listing content on the devices consumers are turning to in ever increasing numbers.
5 Leading Indicators of the Future of Local Search
The local search market is changing. On the buy-side, enterprise advertisers are starting to assert their control, demonstrating that they can leverage large footprints to compete in local with clean distributed data, and accurate claimed citations. Consumers, meanwhile, increasingly want to use their mobile devices for more activities than navigational search, expecting to be able to buy and not only find goods and services nearby. The advancements of local search are evolving so rapidly that a race to control consumer behavior may be brewing between the Davids and Goliaths…