You want vision? LevelUp CEO Seth Priebatsch says his loyalty/transaction marketing company will emerge as a partner for SMBs -- think authentication; orders and refunds; and analytics -- in the same way that Facebook Connect is a partner for media…
Is email still the anchor for customer engagement, given the rise of mobile, social media, texting, websites and big data? With people joking that they don’t even know what email is, you have to wonder. ExactTarget, which specializes in email…
Late last week I had the chance to talk to Telmetrics president and newly minted LSA chairman Bill Dinan about the newest installment of the influential Path to Purchase (PtoP) series. This one zeroes in on the travel vertical and specifically…
Yesterday, BIA/Kelsey issued its annual Global Yellow Pages Forecast, which predicts the industry worldwide would erode at a 4.1% CAGR through 2017. While this forecast may seem bleak, this pace of erosion marks an improvement over the prior five year.…
As traditional local media players begin to lose some of their prominence, the search for alternative local sales channels has become increasingly important. The channel currently being explored: payment processors, which normally focus on selling Point of Sales systems. Processors…
We’re all ready for the next big turning point in local: and to us, it all begins and ends with the SMB market. Just this week, Facebook announced its one millionth SMB advertiser. We’ll be diving deep into digital marketing…
BIA/Kelsey has just released Media Ad View Plus. For those unfamiliar, it builds on our forecast data (example) among other sources, to calculate local media ad spending by category across U.S. ad markets. The starting point is the $132.5 billion…
Digital media services provider vSplash has made inroads with both newspaper and directory/local search organizations with its BuzzBoard sales productivity tool. vSplash is widely known for its website production capabilities, as well as its voluminous data on small-business digital presence,…
With the exception of efforts like AOL’s Patch and New England’s GoLocal24, “Hyperlocal” has really moved away from its initial focus on neighborhood journalism to more of a focus on geo-targeted advertising and commerce. Redefined this way, there’s a lot…
Last month I presented to the International Franchise Association "Fran Camp" conference in Atlanta. To capture and prepare for the presentation, I recorded some of the slides and audio which you can see in the video embedded below. The point…
The SMB payment space has been getting mighty crowded since Square’s 2010 launch. Major merchant acquirers such as PayPal, Groupon, Intuit, VeriFone, Heartland Payment, Swipely, Merchant Warehouse and Total Merchant Services have joined Square in the battle for small spending…
Today's announcement that Gannett is acquiring the Belo television stations was certainly not expected. Even with the increased activity of groups acquiring many medium and small market stations, and last week's announcement that Media General and New Young Broadcasting was…
Groupon founder Andrew Mason’s concept of Groupon as “the operating system for local commerce,” had a certain catch to is, but what does it actually mean in practice? That’s the challenge being addressed by Groupon’s “Breadcrumb” team in Silicon Valley,…
During a Webinar yesterday, BIA/Kelsey's Senior Analyst Mike Boland, along with Marchex VP of Operations Travis Fairchild and Head of SEM Cody Kunning discussed how businesses and those managing online and mobile advertising campaigns can best maximize performance with Google's…
After lots of rumors, and a weekend article from the Israeli based Globes.co.il, Google has announced it acquired mobile navigation company Waze. This comes after a rumored Facebook acquisition (see our writeup), the drivers of which apply here in lots…
In the run up to WWDC, we're hearing the standard chorus of rumors about what Apple will unveil. These include iOS7, new OSX, and iRadio. For the latter, Apple just signed Sony Music to round out its licensing deals with…
Yesterday, I had the chance to talk to Zubair Talib, CEO and CoFounder of YaSabe, about the company's efforts to reach the opportune U.S. Hispanic marketplace. The opportunity comes to the tune of 52 million people and $1.2 trillion in…
ReachLocal is moving boldly to find new ways to boost the business of its SMB customers. While the independent sales organization is still largely supported by the sale of advertising packages to its 32,500 active advertisers, it is now focused…
Cloud-fed Tablets are powerful, game changing tools for SMB payment processing, marketing and promotion. That's the view of Clover Co-President Leonard Speiser, who was speaking this week at The Street Fight Summit West conference in San Francisco. Clover is a…
Wanderful Media will use Goodzer's local retail inventory data to support its recently relaunched Find&Save localized shopping platform. Goodzer's data includes more than 2.5 billion inventory items from more than 500,000 U.S. retail stores. The newspaper consortium-owned Wanderful Media recently…
