Go for Bronze!
Yahoo, Bing, AOL, MSN, ASK?
None of the above. It’s YouTube.
As mentioned in my previous post, this past week was CollegeXTRA.com, Inc.’s 10th birthday. CollegeXTRA.com, Inc. is the corporate name of Union Street Media. As a celebration of this milestone, I’d like to share with you a few of the things I’ve learned over the past ten years.
Running a business of twenty people requires a lot of cash and none of it comes easily. Each month our sales team is responsible for generating well over a hundred thousand dollars. To earn that money, our web development team needs to produce the work, which requires our product development team to create a scalable architecture for the sites. Our internet marketing team needs get the sites up in the search engines so that our clients get the traffic to generate a return on their invest. Our support team needs to keep the sites live, handle incoming phone calls and help clients with updates. Our office manager extrodinaire needs to invoice for all of this work and then made sure we actually get paid for it. This is fun, challenging and inspiring, but not easy.
However, there are free lunches. I know because I used to buy them for people and now, on occasion, people buy them for me. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs requires that we eat. Every day. Often three times. I have used lunch as a way to get an hour with really smart people. Our awesome attorney, Peter Kunin, helped set us on the right course over many-a-$10-sandwich, which is less then his normal billable rate. I have had the opportunity to learn from successful entrepreneurs about the lessons from their businesses over a lunch, and applied those lessons to USM. After a trip to the Google Campus in 2008, I discovered that 110% of Google employees eat free lunch at Google every day (I really appreciated the free lunch even if the shareholders might not). So now we have office lunch too at Union Street Media every Tuesday. We get together as a group, share stories, ideas and hang out. It’s awesome.
Jim Shattuck, the Director of Career Services at my senior year at Middlebury College, had a simple manta: “Network, network, network.” Although I didn’t know it at the time, I actually honed this skill at Middlebury. Freshman year I found out pretty quickly that if I knew the person behind the bar at a campus party, I got my luke warm Natty Light faster. Today, I’m the most public facing employee at Union Street Media. I spend about 10% of my time attending business events in the community and volunteering on boards of other organizations. However, you can’t just take from your network. You have to give back to it. One of the things I like to do the most is connect people in the community with each other, whether it’s for business purposes or friendship. When people move to Burlington, I invite them to the office and share my knowledge of the area. They leave with a sticky pad full of names, emails and phone numbers from contacts at a company where they might find a job to the best guys fix-it-guy (Chris Labelle, 802-343-0269) and mechanic in town (Daren Smith, 802-660-3111).
On the 11th of February at 11am Spencer Taylor, will be giving a talk at the CEDO Winter Business Fair on how to effectively utilize social media for small businesses. The talk will be focused more on strategy then on the actual functionality of various social media outlets. Taylor will focus on how to use Facebook, Twitter and Blogging in concert to gain visibility in the online marketplace and new customers. He will also touch on other business-specific social media platforms such as Yelp and Urban Spoon as well as the hyper-local Front Porch Forum service. Participants will be encouraged to ask questions and interact to discuss their experiences for the group to draw on. We hope to see you there!
Since the last site launch post, Union Street Media has been busy with a variety of exciting projects:
New Hampshire real estate agency Prudential Spencer Hughes is a long time client of Union Street Media. They went for a redesign to update the look of their website. They’re also continuing with our Report Recommend Revise Internet Marketing services to ensure the site’s high level of performance.
Search Engine Optimization
