Austin Bakeshop’s Groupons Reward Existing Customers, Entice Newbies
When newspaper and magazine ads failed to deliver the customers she’d hoped for, Olivia O’Neal turned to the web. As the co-owner of Sugar Mama’s Bakeshop, O’Neal has used group coupons and positive online reviews on sites like Yelp to help turn her from-scratch bakery into a dessert destination for foodies in Austin.
Empowering Local Restaurants Online
In 2011, pretty much every restauranteur knows that their business needs some sort of Web presence. They may just need a functional way to let people know their address and menu, or they may want a more sophisticated marketing outreach, but online is certainly part of the equation. The problem is that most restaurateurs aren’t versed in Web design, and many don’t know exactly what they should be doing online and why…
Atlanta Chef Reaches Diners on as Many Platforms as Possible
When he’s not in the kitchen at one of Atlanta’s top steakhouses, McKendrick’s Steakhouse executive chef Thomas Minchella is busy managing his restaurant’s Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare accounts, along with his personal social media accounts and a company blog. He aims to keep his messages authentic and can’t stand it when celebrity chefs hire outside companies to do their tweeting for them…
Salon Owner Courts a Niche Market of Eco-Friendly Customers
Aurora Marks isn’t a fan of mass-market coupon sites. As the co-owner of Salon Botanique Eco-Chic, an organic hair salon and spa in Morristown, New Jersey, she says she focuses on reaching customers who care more about getting the best quality hair and skin products than about getting a bargain basement price.
CityGrid’s Herratti: Local Is Becoming More and More Fragmented
Jay Herratti has been working in the local advertising space for decades. Previously the CEO of IAC-owned destination guide CitySearch, he currently serves as CEO of CityGrid Media, a “location-aware” advertising network that aggregates local advertisers and extends them across a network of 300+ publishers, including Urban Spoon, Insider Pages, and many others. Street Fight caught up with Herratti recently to talk about the fragmented nature of the local online advertising marketplace and why the Groupon phenomenon is an example of the kind of “closed-loop” advertising model that small businesses love.
The Batavian’s Owens: Start Selling Ads the Day You Launch
The veteran newsman says hyperlocal networks like Patch are at “a disadvantage” when it comes to selling local ads, because there is “a certain barrier of trust that must be overcome” in order to get local businesses on board as advertisers. He also weighs in on the long-term viability of advertising as a business model for local online content.
Phoenix Restaurateur Prefers Social Media Over Coupons
Chef Justin Beckett is one the proprietors behind Beckett’s Table, a go-to restaurant for foodies in Phoenix, Arizona. Since the restaurant opened last year, Beckett has developed a community on Twitter and encouraged check-ins on Foursquare by seeking out diners and introducing himself personally...
EveryBlock’s Adrian Holovaty: Enabling Community Conversation
Journalist and programmer Adrian Holovaty has been building out local news databases for a while now. A former Washington Post staffer, Holovaty is also the creator of the open-source platform Django, as well as chicagocrime.org (which later was folded into EveryBlock).
His site, EveryBlock, was founded in 2007 and supported by a grant from the Knight for two years before being acquired by MSNBC in 2009. After several years of being focused on the data of hyperlocal, the site’s recent relaunch signaled a major change of course, with the understanding that community also needs to be part of the equation.
Here, Holovaty answers some questions by email with Street Fight about EveryBlock’s revamp, who is winning the hyperlocal game, and says it’s “too early to tell” on what local advertisers want from hyperlocal...
‘Newsonomics’ Author Ken Doctor: ‘The Play Is for Tablets’
Media industry analyst and consultant Ken Doctor has been watching the local news space for decades, long before “hyperlocal” was coined. He spent 21 years at Knight Ridder, where he first observed that consumers are willing to pay for local content — and contends that they are doing so even now, as they pick up their local paper. Doctor, an analyst for Outsell, a global research and advisory firm, and for his own firm, Content Bridges, frequently appears at conferences about the transformation of the news industry, and writes regular columns both on his own Newsonomics blog and for Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab. He is non-plussed by hyperlocal efforts like EveryBlock and Topix but sees potential in AOL’s Patch…
Journal-Register’s Brady: Local Advertisers Have a Tech Gap
Jim Brady made a name for himself turning WashingtonPost.com into a serious player on the Web before he went to TBD.com last year, going all in on hyperlocal. But TBD shifted course on strategy last fall and let Brady go at the same time. In March, he was scooped up by Journal-Register Company, which has been a leader in transforming local papers into digital properties.
Street Fight recently spoke with Brady about the future of hyperlocal, including mobile’s key role, the hold daily deals companies have on the local ad market and why Patch should be applauded.
..
Yipit’s Jim Moran: Lots of Winners in Hyperlocal
With so many daily deals sites popping up in the past year (following the mad success of Groupon), it’s natural that consumers would want a way to sift through, aggregate, and personalize these e-coupons to fit their needs. Enter Yipit, which launched in 2010 and draws on over 400 local deals sites (including Groupon, LivingSocial, and Scoop St.) to deliver customized lists of nearby deals...
Street Fight caught up with the company’s CEO, Jim Moran, for a quick Q&A about Yipit’s mission in the hyperlocal space, and whether the daily deals craze might be a “bubble.”..
A Chicago Retailer is Skeptical of Services Like Groupon
Shelley Young is the chef and founder behind The Chopping Block, a recreational cooking school and retail store in Chicago. Since opening her doors in 1997, Young has seen a dramatic change in the advertising landscape. Whereas she once employed a publicist, she now manages multiple social media accounts in-house and offers check-in specials on Foursquare. She remains skeptical about the long-term viability of daily discount sites.
Baristanet’s Debra Galant: How Patch Is Like Wal-Mart
Since its 2004 launch, Essex County, New Jersey-based Baristanet has often been held up as a hyperlocal news success story. Veteran journalists Liz George and Debra Galant created their local information site to be like a coffee shop where people in the three suburban towns they covered could learn about small-scale news and events around them.
Street Fight spoke recently with Galant about the site’s scope and history, whether stories about potholes can really be monetized, and what she thinks of AOL’s Patch...
Topix CEO Chris Tolles: Community Over Content
When hyperlocal news and community site Topix was founded in 2004, the company’s plan was to take all the local news out there and aggregate it into niche news Web pages around hundreds of thousands of topics. The site’s algorithm sorted through 50,000 news sources and created feeds around all kinds of subjects, creating niche content aggregation. But in 2007, the company shifted gears after finding what it thought was an even more compelling product: harnessing the flood of user-generated commentary and debate around their topic areas. Street Fight spoke with CEO Chris Tolles about how hyperlocal has evolved, Patch’s place in the pack, and how journalism is actually just a means to an end…
My Green Lake’s Duncan: Hyperlocal Means Shop Local
Seattle is one of the hotspots of hyperlocal blogs. Its West Seattle Blog boasts 30,000 visitors per month. Capitol Hill Seattle Blog says it gets more than 120,000 visitors per month. My Green Lake is another Seattle blog, with about 16,000 visitors each month, twice the population of the neighborhood it serves, notes its founder, Amy Duncan. Duncan, a former librarian, started the site in 2009 and runs it as a for-profit business currently featuring more than twenty neighborhood-based display ads and participating in three city-wide advertising networks.
Recently, Duncan, who manages both editorial and advertising at My Green Lake, answered a few questions by email...
Boulder’s Om Time Yoga: ‘Inspiring Content’ Works
For Shannon Paige Schneider, marketing locally to customers of Om Time Yoga, the popular yoga studio she founded in Boulder, Colorado, is about connecting. Schneider has found that her clients respond more to inspiring online content – which she posts daily on Facebook and Twitter – than daily deals and web-based promotions. Schneider recently responded by email to questions from Street Fight for its series of conversations with local retailers.…
Backfence Founder Mark Potts: Hyperlocal Takes Patience
News veteran Mark Potts is best known in the industry for his (failed) site Backfence, which pioneered a hyperlocal model that leveraged user-generated content. … Here Potts speaks with Street Fight about which companies are closest to solving the hyperlocal conundrum, how daily deals companies are changing the equation, and whether it’s really viable to do small-scale news with professional journalists.
EIC Brian Farnham on Patch’s Local-National Dance With HuffPo
AOL’s Patch was, handily, the brainchild of Tim Armstrong before he became the media giant’s CEO. In 800 local communities across the country, Patch is one of the bright spots in hyperlocal business models, with each “Patch” manned by a single editor and an ad sales person, and supported by a network of regional editors. But how will AOL’s acquisition of Huffington Post impact Patch? Well, just yesterday Arianna Huffington announced that she is planning to hire as many as 800 new full-time employees to beef up content on Patch’s network of sites and reduce the use of freelancers. Street Fight spoke recently with editor-in-chief Brian Farnham about Patch’s mission, the importance of pothole stories, how to help local businesses navigate online advertising, and the local-national strategy it’s developing with HuffPo.
…
Gowalla’s Josh Williams: Groupon Is One-Dimensional
Location-based check-in service Gowalla is kind of a virtual tour guide, to use the analogy of the day for such companies. Mobile users log in with their location and get information about the places around them, nearby businesses and places their friends recommend. Gowalla integrates both Facebook Places and Foursquare check-ins, and lets users share photographs tagged to places.
Street Fight spoke to the company’s CEO, Josh Williams, who called Groupon “one-dimensional” for now, and discussed the scramble for local ad dollars, the inseparability of mobile and location, and the persistent privacy problem around check-ins...