The Daily Blagica

If you are a current or soon-to-be business owner living in the 2nd Ward (West Loop, South Loop, Bronzeville, Printer's Row, Prairie District), mark a few days in April on your calendar.  With support of Alderman Fioretti's office and the GSLA, I'll be conducting two free sessions to help boost your use of social media for your coffee shop, bakery, consulting business, you name it.

Dates
April 14 - Focus on Facebook
April 28 - Focus on Twitter

Where
Prairie Avenue Gallery (they have fabulous space for private events)
1900 South Prairie Avenue

Time
6:30-8 pm

We'll start with the basics and move up to real examples of how to use each platform. Bring your notebooks and questions. If this is anything like the one hour primer I gave at the last GSLA meeting, there will be quite a bit of interaction.

See you then! You can take the gal from a small business family into a large corporation, but you can't take the love of small business growth outta the gal.

Oh, if you are a 2nd ward business and would like to bring goodies to the event, let me know.

Not sure what I have set in my Pandora profile, but this ad cracked me up.

I still love ya, babe.

http://greatersouthloop.org/2011/01/26/march-gsla-meeting/

BBQ and guitar at Lambert's

Sitting at the bar, which doubles as a dining table. FnB Scottsdale

Let's take the person who decides to start a landscape company.  These green thumbs connect with their customers everyday, but they acknowledge the fact that a highly scalable and efficient tool is needed to serve more customers. Enter social media.  Now, let's take into consideration that this person has been landscaping for years. Perhaps they took over a family business.  Or, this individual was so inspired by Olmsted that their company motto is to make every lawn and bush a work of art. In a nutshell, this entrepreneur understands horticulture in the same way that Michael Jordon knows basketball.

But they don't know social media.

Enter, the social media expert.

Landscape Larry wants to know the basics of how to use a multitude of social media services to accomplish two basic things, loyalty and new customers.  He doesn't need to understand what a social graph is, what the technicalities of the Google algorithm are or the rules and regulations for conducting a promotion outside of Facebook's native environment.

Landscape Larry needs you to get your head around what he does for a living. He needs to know that you have his back and will bring the best recommendations to the table in a way that makes sense to him. Surely, Larry may have additional questions on how a specific platform works, but let him ask the question. Don't throw a series of theories or case studies at him when he simply wants to find people that need front yards polished up.

Don't worry, when the evening rolls in and Landscape Larry is surfing the web, keeping tabs on how you are doing, he'll come across your guest blog posts, retweets and Facebook updates - ensuring him that you are learning about the industry and telling your peers about your findings at the same time.