Today on the steps of San Francisco's City Hall gathered an assortment of directory industry advocates. With a proposed opt-in ordinance on the city supervisors agenda, industry advocates gathered to mount a vocal effort to bring logic to the forefront. While…
Facebook just took the next step in its Facebook Deals service by announcing that it plans to test Groupon-like offers. The service will get started in San Francisco, San Diego, Dallas, Atlanta, and Austin, Texas, the company said last week in a statement. It…
The Internet Yellow Pages business model has largely refocused on hosting small-business websites, and upselling from that position. At least, it has for Yellowbook. Yellowbook Chief New Media Officer Pat Marshall, speaking at the recent Borrell conference in New York,…
Last year, a deal-a-day panel at SxSW Interactive might have been relegated to a satellite campus (read: off-the-beaten-path Austin hotel). Two years ago, it may not have existed at all. But in 2011, group buying is a $1.2 billion market…
We're greatly looking forward to seeing everyone in Boston at ILM East March 21-23 (i.e., Monday-Wednesday). Boston Globe Publisher Chris Mayer is set to welcome everybody to Beantown, and discuss Boston.com's local search, city guide and mobile services. Then we'll…
In the "Field of Dreams" “if you build it, they will come" spirit, when Marissa Mayer takes the stage, thousands are sure to follow. Google's VP devoted much of her keynote at SxSW Interactive to evolutions in Google’s mobile mapping…
In case you missed them, here are a few headlines and links to posts we've written over the past week from the wide world of mobile. -- SXSW: The Location Wars Are On (Again) -- Foursquare 3.0: Just in Time…
On the blog this week, Mike B. covered the big news about Foursquare’s new app and introduced us to Lolay. Jed shared some thoughts about the deal between Bing and The Dealmap to aggregate deals while AT&T announced its own group buying platform as did The NY Times. Jed also answered some questions about social media data from last week’s webinar and I previewed DemandForce’s new Facebook product.
And we shouldn’t pass up pointing to Charles’ post on the survey from Suffolk University that suggests the most overlooked element of small-business marketing is the uniform. The survey found 80% of general building contractors believe their uniform was more effective than Internet advertising. Really, no fooling.
Here’s what we uncovered this week out there in the socialsphere:
What the $%@! Did Your Agency Just Tweet?
Chrysler had to fire its social media agency for tweeting smack about Detroit. No bail out for that tweeter.
Citibank Goes Long on Social
Citibank’s CEO spent a fair amount of his company’s annual report talking about how it needs to embrace social media (and make money), not necessarily in that order of course.
SCVNGR Combines Groupon and Foursquare
LevelUp, a new service from SCVNGR, teaches marketers how to combine game dynamics, social media and location-based services to turn customers into regulars, according to Erica Naone. SCVNGR, financed in part by Google Ventures, makes location-based services a game.
Mobile location apps are coming out of the woodwork as we lead up to South by Southwest, which starts tomorrow. This follows Foursquare's storied beginnings at SXSW ’09, after which it quickly ramped up to its current $7.5 million users.…
The deal-a-day space has gotten more interesting, as major media companies are diving in for their share of the action. Today The New York Times, Comcast’s Daily Candy, Thrillist and Meredith Corp. announced they’d use the deal-a-day platform provided by…
SMB reseller WebVisible went through difficult changes last year, downsizing from 320 to 130 employees and retreating from an ambitious direct marketing program. But it has kept core partners intact; key members of the CEO's installed executive team have stayed…
Yesterday we wrote about the enhancements to the new Foursquare app (v. 3.0). Today there are new details and screenshots in a Foursquare blog post specifically about the new merchant tools to create and organize specials. Here's what we said…
I recently had the chance to catch up with Gary Rudolph, cofounder of mobile and social app developer Lolay. Rudolph is the former VP of technology for CityGrid where he also worked with cofounder Bardia Dejban. Lolay builds custom apps…
The Scandinavian directory and local search player Eniro has unveiled a pay-per-click advertising network, which it calls Scandinavian Ad Networks. The product leverages traffic from Eniro's own properties (including eniro.se, gulesider.no, krak.dk, and kvasir.no) as well as third-party partner sites…
Cars still need to be sold by salespeople and that never changes. And most people still want to get on the phone to talk to their dealer. What does change is the ability to find cars on the Web, notes…
Mobile now accounts for a third of AT&T’s local search, according to AT&T President and CEO David Krantz, who was speaking at the Borrell show last week in New York. “We truly believe that mobile is bigger than the Web,”…
In the run-up to South by Southwest, we're seeing a land rush to promote cool mobile apps. A top category continues to be location apps, following Foursquare's past SXSW success. This year, the hot new categories will be social sharing…
Just in time for South By Southwest -- a historically significant show for Foursquare -- the company is out with the latest version (3.0) of its iPhone app. Many of the features fall closely in line with the company's comments to us…
I first came across DemandForce because it was popping up in Google Maps a couple of years ago. DemandForce was started in 2003 by Rick Berry and Sam Osman to help dentists and auto shops market themselves online. Today, with more than 7,000 clients across a variety of local service verticals, it is a fast-growing local SMB software service company located in the Bay Area. I caught up with Bonnie Wang, DF’s manager of professional services, at SMX West today to get an idea of DemandForce Connect For Facebook, its recently launched social media service.
DF has three apps that help customers generate more demand from Facebook. People can request an appointment via the SMB’s Facebook page with DF’s Easy Scheduler app. Once a customer makes an appointment, it shows up in the SMB’s DemandForce dashboard and will show the source of the lead. Currently more than 1,000 DF clients are using this app. According to Wang, those businesses that are active on Facebook are seeing the greatest use of the app by customers.
Speaking at the Credit Suisse Global Media & Communications Convergence Conference held in Miami, Florida, this week, Ted Cohen (Tag Strategic), Harry DeMott (Raptor Capital Management) and Eyal Goldwerger (TargetSpot) all agreed with Cohen's assertion that localization, personalization and recommendation…
