Last week in local 9/18/2017
Join Local U for the latest public episode of Last Week in Local, a weekly conversation about the articles that attracted our attention during the past week ending September 18th, 2017. This week features Joel Headley, Mary Bowling and Mike Blumenthal.
If you have a special topic you would like us to discuss for our other weekly feature, the Deep Dive in Local, or if you would like to be on one or the other of our segments, reach out and send us the topic and your availability. If you are interested in sponsoring this weekly show also please let us know.
Let us know what you think. Welcome to Last Week in Local!
Toys ‘R’ Us Files for Bankruptcy, Crippled by Competition and Debt
Burdened by massive debt from a Bain and KKR buyout, another “category killer” retailer is on the ropes
Nordstrom’s New Concept: A Store That Doesn’t Stock Clothes
Interesting that the epitome of the retail is opening spaces that are more about “feeling” rather than “touching”
Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in the Safari Browser
As John Gruber noted this is like “a group of peeping Toms objecting to the invention of window shades”.
There’s Blood In The Water In Silicon Valley
The sands of anti-trust sentiment seem to shifting and Google, Facebook and Amazon fall squarely into the danger area both socially and politcally.
Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Reach ‘Jew Haters’ — ProPublica
We are starting to see criticisms of the biases that are inherent in machine trained AI and how some of those might impact society.
Smartphones are driving all growth in web traffic
Google expected to launch new payment product in India
Google, int heir next billion users push, seems to actually have created a market leading payment product.
Ranking your local business part 8: Behavioral Signals • Yoast
Only Google has a full picture of user behavior, so it’s the blackest of Google’s many algorithmic black boxes. Thus, many of the specific behavioral ranking signals I list below are either hypothetical or too new to have been tested by SEO practitioners
Mary’s Links:
Yelp Claims Google Broke Promise to Antitrust Regulators
“Yelp set up a test to see if Google was pulling images from its servers. Yelp says it found Google pulled almost 386,000 images from Yelp in an hour, and then used some of the photos in business listings in Google Maps. Yelp says it searched Google for 150 of those businesses and found that a Yelp photo was a lead image in Google’s Local OneBox—which shows a business’s location, phone number, and reviews—in 111 cases.”
Case Study: Audiologist Offloads Management of Digital Campaigns
Shows that sometimes clients are happy with paid advertising.
Assembled: A Made-to-Order Digital Marketing Event for Small Businesses & Non-Profits
Low cost local event to help Portland SMBs
Joel’s Links:
Restoration Hardware CEO reveals a startling reality about online ad spending
Duh… The idea that “click spam” is new and that Google just started doing something about this last month is ludicrous.
Exclusive: Google is cracking down on sketchy rehab ads
Rehab ads get negative press, so Google takes “swift” action and removes them.
HSAs continue to expand. Now being seen in Chicago on a test basis. Winter IS coming.
Google quietly added a new video feature to Google Maps
Videos rolling out to more users for Google Maps.
Google Executives Twist the Knife in Uber’s Back
It isn’t so much the specifics of the Lyft/Uber/Google controversy, but the fact that each of these companies are banking on some form of mapping information to be a part of their competitive edge. It can expand to many different businesses.
It also means that as marketers we may need to understand and be able to fix many more mapping environments.
