Business. Communications. Social Media. Strategy. | Daria Steigman | Steigman Communications, LLC
From the monthly archives:
Business blogs are designed to raise your profile, add value, and build your relationship with your stakeholders. This list of 50 topics for a company blog offers a great starting point for companies launching blogs and consultants advising clients on their online strategies.
All credit for this list goes to blogger and social media consultant Chris Brogan.
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Even without the economic downturn, most restaurants would be delighted to have a crowd for happy hour. Especially in the last week of August, when much of official Washington is either in Denver, bound for Minneapolis, or just taking advantage of the downtime to get some downtime. Most restaurants–but not Oya.
The Penn Quarter restaurant may look cool and sophisticated, but it’s just a facade. After agreeing to allow IABC/Washington to hold a happy hour at the bar on Tuesday, staff told arriving event organizers that they would have to run one tab, and that the restaurant would add a service charge to every drink. This for patrons buying drinks at the bar. No special room. No extra bartender.
Oya finally dropped that idea, but then they asked event organizers to move the nametags to a far back corner. I guess they were ruining the aesthetics.
After that, I had a glass of water. Then I went to the ball park, where they want my business, said hello to India (my awesome usher), and had a beer.
Business is reputational, and consumers have lots of options. So why would any business opt to make its customers unwelcome?
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There are five concrete steps you can take to position yourself to launch a new business. I’ve talked about Step 1 (Your Value Proposition), Step 2 (Your Contacts), Step 3 (Your Prospects) and Step 4 (Your Business Model). The final step is to create business materials.
You must have something tangible that you can both mail out and bring to meetings that defines who you are, your value proposition, and the services you offer. Depending on how you have chosen to define your business, this could be a single, one-size-fits-all document, or you may want to create several versions targeted to different audiences. Similarly, you will need to draft one or more sample cover letters from which you can pull phrases.
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I’m often asked at networking events about the size of my consultancy. My business model has never been to expand and acquire employees. I like the freedom and independence that comes with being a solopreneur and partnering with really smart marketing communications colleagues.
John Tozzi captures this sentiment well in his recent “Why Stay Small” post on Business Week’s New Entrepreneur blog. He quotes Matt at 37 Signals profile of a NY pizzaria owner:
DeMarco doesn’t care about experts, franchising, or expansion because he doesn’t have to. That’s what you can do when you run your own small business. You can stay small. You can create your own thing and keep it the way you want it.
Tozzi then notes that “we tend to use sales, profit, and growth to measure business success, which ignores the ’soft’ factors like satisfaction.”
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