Online marketing seems to keep getting more complex. Now that every big brand is throwing money at every marketing platform they can, it’s getting a lot harder to drive results. What used to be something that a lot of companies could do themselves now requires an agency. One such agency is OneIMS. They’re a Skokie, IL based company that offers “everything from services like branding and web design to online marketing strategies like SEO and PPC.” Their clients range from small local business to national brands with e-commerce companies falling somewhere in the middle.
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I live in the third biggest city in the country, yet I often feel like there’s nothing to do. Part of that is because most of the things that I like to do are outdoorsy and Chicago isn’t the best city for people like me, but most of it is because I’m not aware of all the cool things happening around me. There seem to be a million startups that have tried to solve this problem, and none have really succeeded yet. Maybe UpOut will change that. They’re a San Francisco, CA based company that “is changing how locals discover unique events in their city.” They do this by pulling in event calendars from a variety of sources and curating the list to only show the most interesting ones.
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St. Patrick’s Day is one of my least favorite holidays. It didn’t used to be, but after moving to Chicago and being inconvenienced by all of the idiots “celebrating,” I’ve lost my patience. However, you have to think the inconvenience is worth it for local businesses–all of the people who are partying are also spending money on drinks, food, and taxis. Maybe these merchants can make up for the headaches of serving these revelers by using Clover. They are a Mountain View, CA based company that replaces the “cash register, payment terminal, receipt printer, and barcode scanner with an all-in-one solution.” They also have a name that made them exceedingly appropriate to feature today.
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Local marketing has been all the rage for the past few years. All kinds of startups have popped up to help small business owners use technology to reach more customers. It’s easy to forget that local marketing doesn’t only happen online. Radio and live events are two marketing channels that have been complemented instead of replaced by technology. That’s good news for Townsquare Media, since they’re a Greenwich, CT based “local media and entertainment company that owns and operates radio, digital and live event properties in 66 small to mid-sized markets across the country.” The last part of that sentence is important because it means that they have jobs all across the country. Townsquare Media owns more than 300 radio stations, and that makes them the third largest owner of radio stations in the U.S.
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You’ve probably noticed that most of the small businesses that you interact with aren’t all that tech savvy. Whether you’ve visited their websites or tried to make a purchase, it’s often glaringly obvious that the owner shouldn’t be anywhere within 50 feet of a computer. The problem is that being online and tech savvy is becoming more and more important to running any kind of business. Merchants who can’t keep up will have a hard time. MOpro makes it easy for business owners to do all of the technical and marketing things that they might not be able to do on their own. They’re a Los Angeles, CA based company that expands “the digital possibilities for small businesses.”
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I made a big mistake in sixth grade. I decided to take French instead of Spanish. In the time since, the Spanish speaking population in the United States has skyrocketed, while whether the French speaking population has grown or shrunk is pretty much irrelevant. Here’s a stat that tells you all that you need to know: almost 10% of all U.S. based Google searches are done in Spanish. Bilingual marketing is becoming a huge business, and we all know that local marketing is already huge. YaSabe is a Herndon, VA based company that is brining the two together. They are “committed to connecting businesses, Latino culture, and community allowing users to be ‘in the know’ and confidently make choices about how and where to spend their time and money.”
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The only time that I’ve been able to redeem a filled loyalty punchcard has been when I’m buying for a group and I immediately fill the card. There’s no doubt that there’s a better solution, and it’s probably digital. The problem is that nobody wants to have an app for every local business they frequent. They want a single loyalty solution that they can use everywhere. We’re not there yet, but there are a number of companies trying to make that happen. In the past we’ve looked at a few businesses that operate in the space like Belly and Groupon (I love their product because you just have to use your credit card to get rewards from a merchant). FiveStars is a Mountain View, CA company that is keeping the loyalty card, but they’re making it universal. One physical card tied to your phone number (and your Facebook account if you want more points) allows you to get rewards at a variety of participating merchants.
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Two days ago when we looked at Spindle, I mentioned that while I don’t find social media particularly valuable anymore, I think that many times it can be extremely helpful for local businesses. The thing is that most local business owners don’t have the time or knowledge to use social media effectively (maybe that’s my problem?). Luckily, there’s a simple solution–pay someone like Main Street Hub to do it for you. They’re an Austin, TX based company that helps “great local businesses around the world connect with customers” through social media. They offer a variety of solutions businesses in the Restaurant, Automotive, Nightlife, Health & Wellness, Hotel, Spa & Salon, Retail, and Pet industries, and they provide a wide range of services tailored to the businesses’ needs.
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I used to be a big proponent of social media, but it keeps getting harder for me to see it as anything but a waste of time. Maybe that’s going a little too far, but I’m at the point where I’m overwhelmed by the endless flow of mostly irrelevant information. I need filters! Depending on what I’m trying to accomplish at a given time, my interest in social content can vary greatly. Spindle is a company that is building “the discovery engine for the social web.” They’re based in Boston, MA and they find “the most relevant and useful social content from shops, restaurants, bars, event venues, museums, art galleries, parks, and other businesses and organizations around you.” It’s only one piece of the puzzle, but when I’m looking for somewhere interesting to go or something fun to do, I’d love to use social data to see what’s out there.
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How many times have you received a punch card from a business to work your way towards some sort of free merchandise? How often have you actually held on to the card long enough to redeem it? The only time a punch card worked for me was when I was buying for a group and maxed out the whole thing at once. The obvious replacement for punchcards is a smartphone app, and Belly is a Chicago, IL based company that is making it easy for merchants to offer loyalty programs. The nice thing is that you only need one card/app for every merchant (as long as they use Belly). All you have to do is flash your card or a barcode from the app in front of the merchant’s Belly iPad and you’ll get credit for your visit.
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Local businesses are about as old school as you can get–many of them have continued to succeed doing the same thing that they’ve done for decades or even centuries. There have certainly been advances that have changed that–refrigeration, digital cash registers, and the Yellow Pages are just a few, but nothing even compares to the Internet–especially the mobile Internet. Local businesses are now able to reach and interact with customers and potential customers in a way that they only could have dreamed of a few years ago. CityGrid Media is a West Hollywood, CA based “leading media company connecting consumers and businesses everywhere local happens.” You’re probably familiar with at least one of their properties which include Citysearch, Insider Pages, and Urbanspoon.
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I keep finding myself talking about local marketing, and there’s a good reason for it. It’s an industry that has taken off in the last couple of years. Previously, the Yellow Pages and newspapers dominated local marketing. The web has eroded large parts of those businesses, but it has taken a while for new options to reach critical mass. Then businesses like Groupon and Yext realized that they could use the same sales strategy that the Yellow Pages and newspapers used, but sell marketing products and services that are results focused. Yodle is another one of these companies. They’re based in New York, NY (with offices across the country), and their mission is “to connect local businesses with consumers so simply and cost-effectively that business owners can’t imagine any other way to advertise.” They aim to achieve this by making online advertising a whole lot simpler for the average small business owner.
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Yesterday we talked about social media marketing. Today we’re going to dive into local business marketing. I’m far more excited by the latter–maybe it’s because there’s something that I love about small businesses or maybe it’s because the payoff from local marketing seems like it can come much more quickly. We’ve seen a variety of companies including Groupon, SinglePlatform, and BrandMuscle that have developed products and services to help local businesses market themselves, and today we’re going to look at a company that has taken a slightly different approach to local marketing. Balihoo is based in Boise, ID, and they are “the premier provider of Local Marketing Automation technology and services to national brands with local marketing needs.” In other words they help big companies with lots of locations tailor their marketing efforts to specific locales.
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My two biggest problems in life are figuring out what to wear and where to go. Since we covered the former yesterday, today it’s time to cover the latter. Ok, those aren’t really my two biggest problems in life, but I sometimes get frustrated that I live in a city the size of Chicago and feel like I can’t come up with a good idea of what I should do on a given weekend. There are a million opportunities out there, but figuring out what’s worth your time is difficult. That’s why Metromix was started as a joint-venture between newspaper behemoths Tribune Co. and Gannett Co. Metromix covers 60 different geographic areas (each individually) and offers a “guide to local restaurants, bars and clubs, events, concerts and movies.” While sites like Yelp have been built off the backs of their users, Metromix has an editorial staff generating content for each of their sites along with some user-generated content; however, smaller cities seem to get less original content. I must admit that Metromix isn’t my go to for what’s happening in Chicago, IL (which is where Metromix is located), but they seem to generate a ton of traffic and they have the resources of two major publishing/ad sales businesses behind them.
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Usually I try to tell you about internships at cool startups before they get big, but I missed the boat with Foursquare, which is based in New York, NY. I guess I was too busy checking in everywhere to remember to look at their internships. For a while I was really into the location-based social network. I used it to run into friends who were nearby, get free stuff from restaurants, and even meet some new people. Eventually, though, I got sick of telling my Foursquare friends and Twitter followers where I was no matter how boring the place might be. But for old time’s sake I’ll tell you where I am right now. I’m at Cool Beans in Bellefonte, PA. They don’t have any Foursquare specials, but they have free wi-fi and a nice atmosphere, which is exactly what I was looking for in a pitstop as I drive from Connecticut back to Chicago today. I doubt my check-in today will lead to my meeting someone interesting, but you never know.
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The Washington Media Scholars Program runs a case competition for college students every year. Participating can get you a scholarship, a trip to DC, networking opportunities, and even extra credit for a class. Learn more here.
What are you up to this weekend? I know that it’s getting to be that time where professors cram in mid-terms (or prelims as we called them at Cornell) before Spring Break, but that’s no excuse to stay in the library all weekend. You need to get out and have some fun, and that means knowing where to go. Finding a good time on a college campus usually isn’t too hard, but once you move into the real world going out and organizing friends can get really frustrating. You’d think that Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and other social networking sites would make it easier to meet up with friends and find cool events/places, but they haven’t really done that yet. That’s where The Hotlist steps in. They’re a New York City based startup that has developed “a social discovery engine that enables you to view what’s happening today, tomorrow and throughout the week among your Facebook friends and the entire world!” The Hotlist was name one of the Top 100 Web Sites of 2010 by PCMag.com, and they’ve received a ton of other press mentions. But it’s really up to you to judge how hot The Hotlist is.
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I don’t know about you, but I try to recycle when its convenient. Like the time my college roommates threw a huge party and I stole all of the empty cans and returned them for the nickel deposits. It was easy money. But I must also admit that I’ve thrown away plenty of recyclables when there wasn’t a proper receptacle for them. Environmentalism is great; however, people respond to incentives, and a healthy Earth a century down the road isn’t much of an incentive for the average person. People need a push, and that’s exactly what RecycleBank does. They’re a New York, NY based company that rewards people for “taking positive green actions.” By doing things like recycling at home, you can earn RecycleBank points. Those points can be redeemed for rewards ranging from Amazon Gift Cards to museum memberships, with lots and lots of other options in between—you can even donate your points.
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Yesterday I was playing beach volleyball when my girlfriend ran up to me as excited as could be. She had taken a walk and spotted a celebrity on the way. Ok, celebrity may be a bit of an overstatement, but Jill Zarin of Real Housewives of New York City is certainly famous. So, we grabbed our camera and tried and failed to get a good paparazzi shot. Back when I lived in Connecticut, a celebrity sighting beyond Paul Newman or Don Imus was pretty unusual for me; however, now that I live in downtown Chicago, I’m seeing famous people left and right. I see Oprah and Jesse Jackson at the gym. I’ve had breakfast next to Charles Oakley, seen Greg Olson out on the town, and dined at the same restaurant as Johnny Damon. Celebrity chefs like Rick Bayless and Graham Elliott have restaurants a few blocks from my apartment, and I’ve even seen the entire Chicago Blackhawks team with the Stanley Cup. If I wanted to share all of those sightings with you in real-time, I could do it on JustSpotted. It’s a celebrity-spotting site run by a San Francisco, CA startup called Scoopler.
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Last night I went out to dinner with my girlfriend and her family. It was a restaurant that I’d never been to before, so I looked it up online to see what I should expect. The user experience on the restaurant’s website was pretty terrible. It was built in flash, and had a splash page that took forever to load. The menu was an image instead of HTML, and I never could load any pictures of the food. This doesn’t surprise me, because restaurants aren’t web businesses. They should excel at being a restaurant and leave the web stuff to someone else. That’s where SinglePlatform comes in. They’re a New York City based company that “provides restaurants one stop to manage their digital presence and gain customers.” SinglePlatform not only enables restaurants to publish all of the information that they want to share, but it also syndicates the restaurant’s content throughout a publisher network of “review sites, mobile applications, and related local guides.”
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While yesterday’s post was about a company that offers weekly deals on discounted gift cards, we did touch on how much growth there has been in local marketing. Local is tough because it requires customization. If you have only one store, you just go about business as usual, but if you’re a franchise of restaurants, for example, how do you ensure that your marketing messages and materials are tailored specifically for each market that you’re in? BrandMuscle is a Cleveland, OH based company that provides “expert local marketing services and develops robust web-based marketing software solutions that enable marketers to generate the absolute greatest return on their marketing investments.” They make local marketing easy, and they do it for some pretty big names.
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Yesterday we talked about one way that brick and mortar businesses are catching up with their online counterparts, and today we’re going to dig deeper into how the Internet is changing the landscape for local businesses. In the past we’ve look at companies like Yelp, Groupon, Yext, and even Google that help local businesses do a better job of marketing themselves. Today we’re going to take a look at Demandforce, a San Francisco, CA based company that helps “service businesses thrive in the Internet economy.” How do they do this? Demandforce provides software-as-service that transforms a business’ customers into a powerful social network. By encouraging referrals and reviews from existing customers, the software helps attract new customers. While it also helps businesses retain existing customers by making it easy to stay in touch with them.
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I’m an unabashed Groupon fan. How can I not support the Chicago based company that started the group-buying frenzy? Moreover, I’m just flabbergasted at the amount of value that they’ve been able to build in such a short time. The only problem with creating an extremely lucrative new market when you have little or no IP is that the competitors come out in droves. There are a lot of Groupon wannabes. A lot. Many of them will fall by the wayside as they realize that they’re not capable of building out the kind of sales/business development team needed to grow a group-buying business, but there are a few competitors that seem to be doing quite well. One of them is LivingSocial, which is based in Washington, DC (maybe they should focus on group-bribing of politicians, or is that called lobbying?). They now offer daily deals in 52 cities, and they have nearly $50 million in venture funding. They weren’t profitable yet as of March, but you have to think that they’ll get there soon.
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If you’re not already a Groupon member, here’s an invitation link.
In February of 2009, when I had only been in Chicago a few months, I got invited to an event for Chicago tech startups hosted by a local incubator named midVentures. I felt awkward when I walked in because I didn’t know a single person, but I quickly got to meeting people. One of the people I talked to was named Andrew Mason. He started a collective action site called The Point that allows you to put up money for big ideas with the qualification that you only have to pay if a certain threshold is met. That way you can put up money to build a collapsible dome over Chicago for the winter, but not have to worry about shelling out the cash unless the project is actually going to happen. At that point Andrew was working on an offshoot of The Point called Groupon. In some ways it was much like One Day, One Job. Instead of offering its readers a new job every day, it offered a deal. It was growing really fast, and he and I both knew that he was on to something pretty neat, but I don’t think either of us appreciated how big it could be at the time. Now, a year later, Groupon is valued at over $1 billion dollars. That would be nine zeroes if you ignored the fact that their actual valuation is around $1,350,000,000 (only 7 zeroes, ha!). The company is growing at an insane rate, and they always seem to be hiring. I’ve pinged Andrew and one of his recruiters a couple of times to let me know when they have positions to feature, but I get so many requests on Groupon that I’m just going to pull the trigger (even if they don’t seem to be too big on interns).
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