Minutive Archive

Minutive, Vol. 14: Pokemon gOverrated?, GMB Practitioners, and More

No. 2386 • July 18th, 2016 • No Comments

Pokémon Go and Local: Why Now? BY MIKE BOLAND If you’ve been on vacation for the past week and are looking for a primer on the context of Pokemon Go, this one from Mike is pretty good–finally an app that provides real “value” in return for sharing your location. Heed this warning, though: “One downside […]

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Minutive, Vol. 13: NOT Pokemon Go, and More.

No. 2383 • July 11th, 2016 • No Comments

What Caught My Eye This Week: Pokemon Go, but I haven’t fully collected my thoughts about it yet. Plenty of far more important stories, though–read on! The Facebook of ecommerce BY BENEDICT EVANS An uncharacteristically rambly post from the brilliant Benedict Evans, but it brings up a couple of very important thought-points that have been […]

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Minutive, Vol. 12: Facebook, Facebook, Facebook — It’s Always Facebook.

No. 2381 • July 5th, 2016 • No Comments

I feel like I achieved a measure of clarity this week on Facebook’s worldview as it tries to compete with the rest of the “Big Four” — Apple, Google, and Amazon. This issue of Minutive seeks to take you through that worldview in roughly 60 seconds. Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends […]

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Minutive, Vol. 11: Location-Aware Social Content, Local Marketing with Sponsorships, and More

No. 2378 • June 27th, 2016 • No Comments

West Elm Is Lifting Sales by Using Customers’ Instagram Photos in Facebook Carousel Ads BY CHRISTOPHER HEINE Though the story calls out this UGC idea for use in paid campaigns, I’ve long advocated it, especially for larger brands, as an easy win for unique, compelling, authentic content on organic location pages. Twitter quietly launches tags […]

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Minutive, Vol. 10: Yelp’s Lobbying Efforts, Branded vs. Unbranded Searches, and More

No. 2375 • June 17th, 2016 • No Comments

Yelp Gets Massive ROI from Its Lobbying Efforts BY YOURS TRULY Yelp has rather quietly spent almost $700,000 on lobbyists in the last 18 months, including payments to the former general counsel of the Senate Antitrust committee, Seth Bloom. And it looks like that investment is paying off, as the Commerce Committee and FTC are […]

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Minutive, Vol. 9a: Google Dark Search, YP vs. “Guys,” and More

No. 2341 • June 10th, 2016 • No Comments

Organic Search Traffic Down in May? The Google App May Be to Blame BY DAVE COPPEDGE You can probably predict where this is going from the headline. More and more search referrals are showing up as “direct” traffic — a trend towards “dark search” which will almost certainly accelerate with the rise of voice results. […]

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Minutive, Vol. 9*: Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends, IPAs (No, Not That Kind), and More

No. 2333 • June 3rd, 2016 • No Comments

KPCB Internet Trends Report 2016 BY MARY MEEKER For those of you not immersed in the tech world, this annual report is the gold standard in synthesizing global business and consumer trends in digital media, software, and hardware. The link above points you to my favorite slide in this year’s deck, in which Baidu predicts […]

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Minutive, Vol. 8*: Google’s Go-to-Market Gap, Is the SEM Agency Dying? and more.

No. 2331 • May 27th, 2016 • No Comments

Google’s Go-To-Market Gap BY BEN THOMPSON Google the search engine reached mass adoption simply by being so much better than everything else. But in the new era of voice and messaging as the primary search interfaces on mobile, zero-friction “good enough” search on Apple, Facebook, and Amazon may prevent history from repeating itself. The SEM […]

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Minutive, Vol. 7*: A Voice Search Benchmark, GMB Spam, and More

No. 2328 • May 22nd, 2016 • No Comments

Google says 20 percent of mobile queries are voice searches BY GREG STERLING We now have a benchmark for voice search. As I suggested last week, I predict this number eclipses 50% of mobile queries (and becomes the single largest search type) in under three years. Over 40% of all voice searchers have adopted it […]

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Minutive, Vol. 6*: More on Voice Search, Chatbots, San Francisco, and More

No. 2326 • May 13th, 2016 • No Comments

Siri’s creators say they’ve made something better that will take care of everything for you BY ELIZABETH DWOSKIN To quote one of my favorite fake-Sean-Connery lines from Celebrity Jeopardy, “The game is afoot” in voice search. Viv launched to quite a bit of fanfare this week, and unlike beacons, this is a category that does […]

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