CityMaps Releases Mobile App, Wants to Be Kayak for Places Info
After spending three months in a web-only beta, social mapping service CityMaps is making its move to mobile. The New York-based company has released its first mobile app on iOS this morning and has announced its expansion to San Francisco and Austin. The service is essentially a Kayak for local information, aggregating local signals from sites like Yelp, Twitter, and Foursquare as well as commerce companies like OpenTable, Fandango, and handful of daily deal sites…
AmEx + Twitter Could Equal Huge Opportunity for Local Businesses
American Express just taken another major step into local. The credit card company has partnered with Twitter to create a program that allows consumers to receive discounts directly applied to their accounts — all for the price of a single hashtag in a single tweet (after a quick, one-time visit to AmEx’s website to sync a card)…
Local Marketing Shifts From Ads to Interactions to Requests
There’s a huge opportunity to aggregate potential leads across these siloed services in real time, and notify or proxy respond on behalf of local businesses so they can service leads immediately. In this online new paradigm, small business no longer needs to wait for their customers, they cherry-pick on demand…
Street Fight Daily: 02.09.12
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Groupon Reports Quarterly Loss, But Beats Revenue Expectations (AllThingsD)…
AOL Hires Chief Content Officer for Patch (Reuters)…
‘There Are No Layoffs Planned,’ Says Patch (Romenesko)…
Hyperlocals Need to Protect Their Social Media Branding
Customer lists, brand names, and social media accounts are valuable assets for hyperlocal news publishers, and they should be protected like money. Publishers should put agreements in place to stipulate that any online accounts provided in connection with site business remain with the publisher upon termination of any relationship…
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…
Local Quotables: Dorsey, Josic, Brody & More
This week’s top quotes come from Twitter and Summify as they discuss their new partnership in order to increase delivery of instant, relevant news. This week also features Harvard researchers explaining why some ventures succeed and Boyan Josic of Daily Deal Media asserting the growing success of daily deals companies…
Local Spend on Social Media to Increase Seven-Fold by 2016
A new report from Borrell Associates indicates that local merchant spending — not simply presence — on social media will explode over the next four years. Total local online social spend is estimated to grow from $1.1 billion in 2011 to $7.8 billion in 2016, with the local’s share of the total spend doubling from 12 percent to 24 percent over the same period…
Case Study: For Tasti D-lite Builds Loyalty with Passive Check-Ins
“They used to call it ‘stalking,'” said BJ Emerson at the LocNav Conference this month. “Now they call it ‘location-based marketing.'” The VP of technology at Tasti D-lite has tongue firmly planted in cheek, as the frozen yogurt chain has evolved its basic punch card program into a highly digital loyalty effort involving Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter.
Beyond the Banner: Using Twitter Posts as Ad Updates
The publisher of CarsonNow.org has created an advertising system that uses Twitter to supply quick updates to ads. It takes the advertiser’s latest tweet and pairs it with a logo image, and displays it like a banner ad. The logo supplies the branding power, while the text of the tweet carries the advertising message…
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.”
Street Fight Daily: 07.25.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Conquering “local” remains one of the largest opportunities on the Internet today, and it seems as though Twitter’s unique position has gone largely unnoticed, writes Victor Wong of PaperG. “If Twitter chose to focus more on location, higher user engagement and even monetization would likely follow.” (TechCrunch)…
OpenTable, the restaurant reservation Web site, will offer 30 percent off some dinner reservations through a new partnership with Savored, a start-up that offers daily deals for high-end restaurants. (New York Times/Bits)…
Case Study: Online Marketing In a Small Town
When Todd Kuhns opened Pickler’s Famous earlier this year, he hoped to save money on advertising by creating buzz online. Unfortunately, the Kirksville, Mo., ice cream parlor owner has found that many residents of his small town are reluctant to use tools like Foursquare and Twitter. So, he’s developed a blended approach to advertising that […]
Can Twitter Make Local Pay?
In the next few months, Twitter plans on rolling out tools to help local merchants buy tweets. Many local merchants that are already Twitter savvy are already tweeting deals and messages to their followers and responding to comments — so the obvious question is, will they pay for what they are getting for free? And how can Twitter add additional value for local merchants bombarded by marketing tools claiming to solve their problems.