This is the first in what will be a running series of profiles of local-commerce companies.

Facebook began testing a feature allowing its users to pay to promote their posts in New Zealand back in May. Now it’s opening up the test to users in the U.S. The feature allows Facebook users with fewer than 5,000 friends and subscribers to pay about $7 to promote a post. After paying for the […]

Twitter is partnering with Nielsen to give a small set of advertisers the ability to test brand surveys. These tweets, which will come from @TwitterSurveys, will appear in users’ time lines. They’ll ask users to fill out a survey within the tweet. “This is a native experience for the user, and we believe it will […]

Olivia Munn is giving PETA a celebrity face in its campaign against Groupon’s promotion of circuses that have received citations for violations of the Animal Welfare Act. “Groupon is selling out animals who are forcibly taken away from their mothers, have their spirits broken, are kept in chains, and are threatened with beatings if they […]

There are strong signs that organic Facebook page posts are seeing their reach drop by up to 40 percent in some cases. In other words, when a fan of a page shares a post, their friends are less likely to see it. Facebook could be aiming for a mix of 80 percent organic content and […]

Groupon used to be easy to turn your nose up at, but the company’s announcement of its Payments product changed things for this investor. He saw it as a signal that the company is diversifying its business and bulking up its competitive advantages. In other words, Groupon is becoming much more than just a daily-deals […]

Contact: Marly Zimmerman Assistant Marketing Manager DM Confidential [email protected] New York, NY (October 3, 2012)

According to a report from Econsultancy, produced in association with Outbrain, 90 percent of digital marketing professionals surveyed said content marketing will become more important in the next 12 months. However, just 38 percent of in-house marketers and 13 percent of agencies have a content marketing strategy in place. “Maybe that is a sign that […]

GroupRaise.com is setting out to help restaurants in a way that’s vastly different from the approach the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial are taking. The new company is helping restaurants host in-restaurant fundraisers, which it says is a “proven way of getting large groups of customers who come when restaurants want them, spend more, and […]

Locu , a startup based in San Francisco and Boston, is launching a free merchant dashboard product that enables owners and managers of restaurants and other service businesses the ability to manage things like price lists and menus on their website, mobile site, mobile app, Facebook and local search directories. This Web-based dashboard gives merchants […]