ENET Advisory Board members Christina Inge and Tim Schmidt with TRA360’s Ryan Connors
This past week was ENET’s (Boston’s IEEE Entrepreneurs’ Network) monthly meeting on legal and tax issues. I guess there’s no big reason to learn about those when starting a company. Who likes keeping their hard earned money anyways? Did you catch that?
Decisions made in the early stages of forming a company are critical to the company’s future. From forming as an LLC, C corp or S corp, there are pros and cons that must be fully understood to prevent things such as double-taxation (don’t we pay enough?), unnecessary liabilities, and future investments. Now all of these can’t be laid out in a single article, and even so I’m not qualified to do so. I happen to know a few people that would be qualified and ENET is the place to meet them. It’s good food for thought.
The next meeting will be January 3rd from 7:00 – 10:00PM at the Foley Hoag Emerging Enterprise Center, 1000 Winter Street, Suite 4000 (north entrance), Waltham, MA and will be on Creating a Technology Services Company. The meeting is sure to be an exciting one and will feature none other than Valentina Rosa, founder & CEO of TRA360, and a panel of seasoned entrepreneurs. If you’re interested in the topic or just in networking with the best group of professionals in Boston, ENET is the place to be.
Amanda Pensack recently joined TRA360 as a Social Media Strategist. Over the next several months she will be developing new social media campaigns, promotions and tactics using social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. To date, Amanda has been learning about the business, customers, and projects. She’s also been tweeting on TRA360’s Facebook page, main Twitter account, and created new Facebook pages for TRA360’s Regulatory Writing and Technical Documentation practices.
Amanda graduated Cum Laude from Elon University in May 2011 with a BA in Strategic Communications. Amanda’s background is in Public Relations and online media working with B2B companies. Amanda worked at MGR Strategic Communications in August 2011 as a New Business Coordinator where she helped pitch social media strategy to potential clients. Her past experience includes working for a non-profit organization that benefits poverty-stricken families called Step Up of Alamance based in Burlington, NC. While at Step Up for two years, she helped film and produced videos for the organization’s open house, designed a logo and a letterhead, blogged on behalf of the organization and put together a photojournalism project that told the story of a homeless single mother’s troubles.
Amanda has also worked for Allied Integrated Marketing in Boston, MA where she helped promote films from major film studios including Disney, Fox Searchlight and Sony Pictures. Her favorite gig was helping to promote the movie “500 Days of Summer” with the Sausage King of Boston in Fenway Park, where they handed out 500 free sausages to Red Sox fans. Amanda has also spent time studying and interning overseas in Australia. After moving from Cairns to Sydney in 2010, she began working as a Social Media Strategist for Residex, a company that sells information on the housing market in North Sydney, Australia. While at Residex, Amanda developed a social media platform and business model for the company to implement. Amanda’s work at Residex culminated in the hiring of a full-time social media professional.
Like a lot of people, I’ve been hearing and reading about ebooks for quite a while. As the owner of a communications business, I never find a shortage of new technologies to learn about, track, and try out. Some days I wish I could just spend getting new stuff, playing with it, figuring out how it works, and then writing about it. A close friend of mine does this for road bikes (a passion of mine) and I think that’s way cool. He doesn’t get paid much for doing it but has a great time.
Back to the topic at hand…eBooks. Everyone’s heard of them, millions of people use eBook devices of all flavors—iPads, Kindles, Nooks—and tens of millions of eBooks have been sold. Consumers and students are on top of the wave. But this wave hasn’t really caught hold big-time in publishing technical content yet…but it will.
The speakers made a good case for thinking about eBook content in a whole new way, not just throwing existing content onto an eReader device and calling it an eBook. In certain ways many of the topics they discussed reminded me of the early days of online doc and help. Save As PDF or Save As HTML don’t make for optimal user experiences. They talked about the different types of eBooks and the capabilities of different eBook devices. The speakers knew their stuff and tried to cram as much as they could into 60 minutes.
What to do next? If you’re like me, you’ve gotten the wake-up call. Get a copy of eBooks 101 and continue learning!
So this past week I’ve been hitting the events hard, from the Gilbane Conference to WebInno, and tonight at the PunchBowl Startup Community Mixer. Rather than go over the usual of who I met, what they do and what I think, I’m going to take a less ego-centric approach and share what I learned.
The Gilbane Conference was an awesome experience in the four hours I spent there. The event was focused on web content management and customer relationship management, which are big fancy terms for getting good stuff online, making it easy to find, getting involved with customers online, providing content and managing all of the things that go into a website and how they relate to a business and can be improved.
As one of the executives put it, if companies spent a fraction of the time creating content as they do trying to optimize their site, SEO, or finding news ways of managing the customer online experience, they would be much better off. The latter is still critical in today’s saturated online market, but things like hits and being on Google’s front page will come naturally as an effect from the cause of good content. What good is a top three ranking if when a prospect clicks on your site they can’t find anything worthwhile? Will a great call to action matter if there is no online presence to back it up? These are all pieces of a business that are interwoven and must be part of a strategy beyond “lets just be on Facebook.” Why do you want to be on Facebook is an important question where in the answer lies the key- to make customers and prospects happy. How do you make a person happy when they are interested in your industry? You guessed it- provide great content free of charge.
Now there are many services out there trying to do all of this stuff for you, and that may be necessary for large corporations. But for people like you and I, we are tasked with trying to do this for small to medium sized businesses. Find out what your customers are interested in, throw the ball back and forth a few times, and make sure your time is well spent engaging people where they are. As the adage goes, fish where the fish are. And no, large nets and trolling do not apply. It doesn’t matter if you have 10 customers or 10 million, everyone wants to feel special and they can tell when an approach is gimmicky or a poorly disguised sales pitch. Give them the free content, and from there you can funnel the prospects and make some money. The more content you make- the better! After all, if someone is interested in say a video on SEO that you just posted, they are likely to check out what else there is and share it. Viral growth doesn’t have to always be by accident or chance, there’s a strategy that can be implemented and it starts with content and the customer. By becoming a trusted source and thought leader, you will be well on your way to getting that ROI every marketer is gauged on, and it will be a heck of a lot more effective than an outbound marketing campaign (though both at once is better).
