The Inside Press

Magazines serving the communities of Northern Westchester

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How to Jump Start a New Business

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By Kristen Ruby

Are you contemplating starting a small business? Or perhaps you have a business that you are hoping to grow? If you haven’t gotten into the swing of using social media, you are foregoing tremendous power. Social media: Blurs the lines between advertising, branding, public relations and marketing.Functions as a “sharing” tool. At the heart of new media is publishing and content creation. A steady flow of content is released through the various networks to reach as wide an audience as possible. On Twitter, this is referred to as a tweet; on Facebook, it is a “note;” and on a blog, it is simply a post. The tone of the message on each of the social networks should be molded accordingly. For example, your fans on your company’s fan page may differ from your Facebook followers–always create separate messages to address each of your audiences in the tone that is most commonly used on that network.

Also, be sure to utilize LinkedIN as your virtual “rolodex” and socialize your business. Every time you meet someone at a business function, connect with them on LinkedIN and then follow them on Twitter and Facebook. Make sure you secure a minimum of five recommendations from colleagues and clients you have done stellar work for! The next time someone tells you how great you have done on a project, ask them to put it in writing on LinkedIN. This will help your “virtual referral” cycle kick start!

At Ruby Media, we help clients gain new business by creating a social media presence. For example, to help with the launch of this publisher’s new title, Single&smart Magazine, we created Facebook invites and fan page and used Twitter to tweet press releases. We created YouTube videos from the Single&smart launch party in July. We published compelling photo albums and we tweeted relevant dating articles that our followers would find interesting. We also created a “Westchester’s Hottest Bachelor” campaign to increase visibility for the magazine and draw in a wider male demographic. All submissions have come via social media referrals for the contest!

Social Media helped jumpstart the launch of Klobe Card, a new card which diners can use to receive 50% off of their food bills at top restaurants. Through tweeting, we have essentially “warmed” the sales cycle by interacting with restaurants and building relationships with them before making initial contact. By heavily promoting other restaurants for Restaurant Week, we have received a great deal of engagement with the brand itself.

Regardless of what your industry is, do not be afraid to use social media! My most recent client, Happyheads, is a lice removal product. We tweet about lice tips, post lice removal videos and are starting a lice blog. You would be amazed at how many Mom bloggers are blogging about organic removal tips! Regardless of your product, there is a social media niche for you.

Common Social Media Mistakes
A lot of businesses are utilizing Foursquare, a geolocating service where you “check in” your current geographic location vs gps app. It enables other members in your network to know exactly where you are located. Do not check in on foursquare when meeting with a prospect– only alert your “followers” and “fans” of your location after the deal is closed! Do not post pictures of meetings with prospects, free lunches they give you or anything else until the contract is signed! This will alert all of your competitors that follow you on your social networks that company X has an RFP out with other agencies. Avoid over sharing–be discreet with what you post–and if you find this too hard to manage then create two separate accounts–one for business, and one for personal.

Finally, please realize: Social media is not the marketing strategy; but it is the way through which the marketing message is shared. Clients come to us for marketing assistance, and we utilize social tools to promote the message, the cause, and the business accordingly.

Kris Ruby is the President & Founder of Ruby Media Group, a Public Relations, Personal Branding and Social Media Agency. Kris also leads national speaking engagements on branding for Microsoft and the ABA has been featured on MSN Money, AOL Small Business, ABC Good Morning CT, NBC and News 12. Kris is a columnist for Forbes Woman, Inside Chappaqua, JDATE and Single& smart magazine and was the youngest ever to be chosen for the Business Council of Westchesters “40 Under 40” Rising Stars.

A Peacible Kingdom

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By Rick Reynolds

As my only child heads off for college, suddenly my head is filled with dreamscapes of her growing up in Chappaqua. Chappaqua was, in essence, my gift to her. And unlike me, she’d get to begin life there.

The Hamlet was a haven for me when I arrived as a skinny 8th grader from Long Island to rebuild my young life. North of White Plains, the landscape seemed to open up. For me the congestion, cement, smog , and well, badness of megalopolis released its grip, giving way to an oasis of frog-filled swamps, fishable ponds, pristine reservoirs, and yes—the mighty Saw Mill River. Like my pitch-perfect hero, Clemens (Samuel, not Roger), I dreamed of sidewheel steamships plying the tricky currents of the bifurcating Saw Mill River— admittedly a stretch, but soothing as I acclimated to my new home. Chappaqua had scale. Okay, it wasn’t the vast plains of the frontier, as Horace Greeley aptly pointed out, but with a little squinting, one could imagine being at Walden—not in the 12X15 foot cabin sense—but in the modest, 5,000 square foot Eldorado ranch vein, surrounded by old growth trees and lawns greener than Kermit.

It was into this gauzy image I wanted my child born. Having moved up from Greenwich Village in NYC, where I had met my wife, Chappaqua beckoned as the perfect incubator for our little hatchling.

And she took it like a true amphibian. She was catching frogs and dressing them up as ballerinas at age 2. And wrestling snakes by the age of 3.

“Look who’s living with us now, Da Da,” she’d say, holding up a confused-looking (later indignant) water snake. Turned out the snake was pregnant, and the resultant fingerlings had migrated under our house shingles, coming out to sunbath on our patio from time-totime— but I digress.

By the time she was entering kindergarten, my daughter was collecting a menagerie of dogs, parrots, rabbits, squirrels, turtles, toads, and crickets, when not riding horses at the various stables ringing North Castle. The country life Chappaqua afforded her was the Petri dish in which she evolved. Now it’s part of her DNA.

Of course, for my daughter, these romanticized images would give way to romantic interests and the angst of onset, childhood puberty, when the pool club was no longer a warm, round, splash pool to pee in—but a parade ground of lean, tan, shirtless boys in Speedos serving up hamburgers and Airheads.

She cruised right through the year I first set eyes on Chappaqua, never knowing there were belching factoryscapes and towns crisscrossed with ribbons of interstate interchanges. Where your house address was a highway exit. She was spared this.

Sitting up here in sunny New Hampshire, it’s all a blur to me now. What is it that Chappaqua does to us? Lord knows, when you wipe the Vaseline from your lenses, the town wasn’t Shangra La, but it was, and is, damn nice. The affluence that allows the town to remain bucolic does not prepare one for the realities of the rest of the country, let alone the world. But as my little girl leaves the nest, I know she’ll be drawn back someday to that Peacible Kingdom—Chappaqua—as I was, 24 years ago today.

Chappaqua alumnus and 35-year resident, humorist RICK REYNOLDS resides in southern New Hampshire with his wife, daughter and dog.