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#the community building and cultural celebration and inclusion in my local areas at home are the best ever
dreadfutures · 19 days
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I am really so grateful to have grown up where I grew up and gone to college where I went to college 🙏 getting to know people from all over the world and all walks of life and emphasizing our common humanity and the importance of solidarity against empire and the establishment
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thegaytraveler · 3 years
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Pride Journey: Atlanta
By Joey Amato, Guest Contributor Almost everyone has been to Atlanta at some point or another. Whether for a conference or just passing through the Hartsfield-Jackson airport, the busiest airport in the world, Atlanta sees more than 100 million visitors per year. As the largest city in Georgia and one of the largest in the country by population, Atlanta has exploded to become an economic powerhouse. Skyscrapers are popping up throughout the city and many Fortune 500 companies have a presence in the region. Of course, the city is known for their hometown favorites: Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines and Turner Broadcasting System, which was founded by none other than Ted Turner, who’s name is everywhere in Atlanta. Turner has a downtown street named after him as well as three namesake restaurants – Ted’s Montana Grill – just in the Atlanta city limits.
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[NOTE: An Atlanta CityPASS allows visitors to see many of the city’s top attractions, handpicked and packaged together at a significant savings.]
Not too far from the downtown restaurant is Centennial Olympic Park, home of the 1996 summer Olympics. The park is adjacent to three other incredible attractions: the Georgia Aquarium, World of Coca-Cola and National Center for Civil & Human Rights. On this visit, I decided to first swing by World of Coca-Cola, which gives visitors a wonderful overview of the history of the brand, talks about the secret formula and of course offers the opportunity to sample Coca-Cola products from around the world. If you time your visit right, you may even get a chance to take a picture with their mascot, the Polar Bear.
Next, I stopped by the National Center for Civil & Human Rights, a museum I had visited in the past. This time I was given a tour by the Executive Director for the LGBTQ Institute at the museum. Although the Center doesn’t have a specific LGBTQ exhibition, it does talk about the fight for LGBTQ rights throughout the years. The Center also houses the largest collection of papers and artifacts of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and has recently expanded their offerings to include a human rights training program for law enforcement officials as well as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) experiences for workplaces. One of my favorite things about Atlanta is MARTA, their public transportation system. It is one of the most efficient and inexpensive in the country, easily connecting travelers from the airport to all parts of the city including Buckhead, where I was staying for this visit. While the Buckhead neighborhood isn’t known for its LGBTQ nightlife, it is however known for its abundance of luxury shopping. Lenox Square is one of the most upscale malls in the country and boasts retail boutiques including Fendi, Louis Vuitton, and Prada. Don’t forget to bring your credit card! The reason I chose to stay in Buckhead is because I wanted to check out the brand new Kimpton Sylvan Hotel. The mid-century modern property is a short ride, or 20-minute walk to the MARTA station and features a rooftop bar, daily social hour with complimentary wine as well as a 24-hour fitness center with Peloton bikes for those looking to work off some calories. Speaking of food, I would highly recommend the Charred Cauliflower + Cucumber from Willow Bar located just outside the hotel lobby. The Kimpton brand is known for being one of the most LGBTQ-inclusive hotel brands in the country so whenever I have the chance to stay at one of their properties, I usually do. They are also a global partner of IGLTA.
This September, Atlanta will host the IGLTA Global Convention. The International LGBTQ+ Travel Association will welcome guests from around the globe to midtown Atlanta for possibly the first in-person LGBTQ convention since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Registration is now open through the IGLTA website. I’ve been to this convention numerous times and can’t wait to see all my friends and colleagues in the same room once again
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[NOTE: Atlanta is planning to hold an in-person Pride celebration in October.  Exact details are not yet available.  Visitor atlantapride.org for updates.]
Midtown Atlanta is the epicenter of LGBTQ culture and nightlife in Atlanta. There is no lack of bars and restaurants here. Some standouts include Joe’s on Juniper, Blake’s on the Park, and My Sister’s Room, a two-story lesbian-owned dance bar which has become a favorite among Atlanta’s LGBTQ community.
The Midtown neighborhood is also known as the cultural hub of the city with over 25 different arts and cultural venues and more than 30 permanent performing arts groups residing in the area including the Grammy-winning Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and the world-renowned High Museum of Art. Not too far away is Zoo Atlanta, an AZA accredited facility home to over 1,000 animals. Having a deep love for animals, I decided to take the elephant encounter, a one-hour experience that gives visitors a behind-the-scenes look at how zoo staff care for these majestic animals. During the program, we learned about the elephant’s behaviors and even had the opportunity to feed them. In this case, Tara was especially fond of the lettuce that I was giving her. After touring the zoo, head over to Guac y Margys, an LGBTQ-owned restaurant located along the Atlanta BeltLine’s Eastside Trail. Everything I tried here was on point, from the house made guacamole to the slow roasted pork tacos. If you are in the mood to sample a variety of different cuisine, check out Ponce City Market, located in the historic Sears, Roebuck & Co. building. The indoor/outdoor market offers dozens of dining and retail options including my favorite, Botiwalla Indian Street Food. Atlanta is truly a multi-cultural destination that needs to be explored in its entirety. Venture away from the tourist-focused neighborhoods and meet the locals. You are sure to find surprises around every corner.
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EVERYBODY LOVES FIN: EPISODE 19
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Canucks Twitter has never been more passionate, divisive and heavily opinionated; let’s go with an all-encompassing—vibrant. Any fan base is a community of people with thoughts to share, and luckily for others, content to create for a wider audience. I have to admit, I’ve been largely on the outside of Canucks Twitter, merely because I tend to direct my opinions to a TV screen rather than on social media. That being said, lately my sister, Pass it to Bulis contributor and Botchford Project recipient, Natalie Hoy, has been encouraging me to listen to more Canucks-centric podcasts. It’s been a fun time.
2010s: Does Vancouver really need two all-sports radio stations? 2020s: Does Vancouver really need 741 Canucks podcasts?
— Jyrki21 (@Jyrki21)
June 9, 2020
The world of ‘audio blogging’ has only grown over the past few years. Listeners are able to multi-task - exercising, cooking, cleaning, driving or on public transit - while plugged in to a new episode on practically any personal device. It’s a form of entertainment, often interactive, and a perfect creative outlet for amateur (and experienced) broadcasters looking for a new project. There is no shortage of podcasts courtesy of Canucks Twitter, a testament to the commitment and drive of fans, and the accessibility of the art form. With the Qualifying Round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs just about underway, there is much to be talked about. Let’s take a look at what’s out there.1
C4 Podcast
Founded: July 2013
Players: Chris Golden (@lyteforce), Anna Forsyth (@aforsyth03),Matt Lee (@mattlee_61)
Premise: The longest-running, active Canucks podcast (birthed from Canucks Hockey Blog) has been on-air for 7 years! Originally co-hosted by Chris and parody song creator Clay Imoo (@CanuckClay), the podcast offers commentary about current Canucks and NHL affairs, prospects, expectations, reminiscing on the team’s past (memories of the retired taco lover Eddie Lack and past playoff runs), and features interviews with guests. This past season, they’ve had Patrick Johnston (The Province), Satiar Shah (Sportsnet 650), Cam Robinson (Elite Prospects, Dobber Prospects) and Dan Murphy (Sportsnet) in the hot seat.
Twitter | Patreon | Discord | Listen
In the "longest-running" #Canucks #PodcastLikeThat, @risingaction joins @aforsyth03 @lyteforce & @mattlee_61 to talk about the summer training camp so far, how the Canucks match against the Wild, Rathbone, Tryamkin and so much more! https://t.co/ACreWPcPWC
— #PodcastLikeThat (@TheC4Podcast)
July 21, 2020
Area 51
Founded: December 2019 (relaunch)
Players: Sean Warren (@SeanyeWest234), Samantha (@samanthacp_), Malcolm Ert (@malcolmert), Bradley Thomas (@bradthomas_96), Eric (@breakawayeric), Bailey Broadbent (@baileybroadcast)
Premise: Area 51 celebrated a relaunch last December since their inception in July 2019, and in May welcomed a team to join host Sean Warren. Aside from their cool, alien conspiracy branding, at the mic they cover a broad range of hockey talk with notable guests (writers and broadcasters in the media, content creators, musicians, WHL players, fellow blog/podcast owners, Canucks Autism Network). I love that they’ve started to cover important topics beyond the gameplay, like anti-racism, inclusivity, and diversity in sports, and have actively sought out the guests to do so.
Twitter | Instagram | Listen
HERE WE GO! @CanuckClay enters A51 in GLCPC to discuss: -Sports debates -Being a hockey media creator -Plan a Vegas trip -Drinking and Parenting tips And complete the famous Guest Shootout! Find out whether Clay is responsible for the Luongo trade!https://t.co/Zg629tWvLG
— Area 51 Hockey Podcast (@Area51Hockey)
July 24, 2020
Cap Space Wins Cups
Founded: February 2020
Players: Hassan Ahmed (@_hassanahmed9), Ahsan Ahmed (@ace103196), Hussain Ahmed (@hussain11ahmed)
Premise: The newly formed podcast has a light, humorous tone - evident by their inaugural episode introduction about their lack of social media followers. They cover quick hits of the Canucks week, roster situations, hockey culture, and of course, cap space. They’ve hosted fellow podcast hosts and media (Satiar Shah, J.D. Burke, Matthew Sekeres, Jeff Paterson), and even a fellow Burnaby kid, Massimo Rizzo. Rizzo was a 2019 Carolina Hurricanes draft pick. It’s clear they have a lot more to share, including takes in on their corresponding blog – see: How the Canucks Can Acquire Dougie Hamilton & Build a Cup Contender. I’ll read anything related to Dougie Hamilton.
Twitter | Instagram | Listen
🚨🚨Another HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT the boys have their own website 🚨🚨https://t.co/JfQXqiXcz2, the site has all the podcast epidoes and links to all their social media. The boys have also started blogging and have 2 big article out already! It’s 100% free sign up on the site to L&C!
— Cap Space Wins Cups Podcast (@capspacecups)
June 21, 2020
The Broadscast
Founded: July 2020
Players: Vanessa Jang (@vanessajang), Georgia Twiss (@georgiatwiss), Samantha (@samanthacp_), Mallory (@sports_lesbian), Danielle Huntley (@danihuntley)
Premise: Your ‘local hockey girl gang’ talks Canucks, sports culture, and soap operas. All 5 hosts have a significant following on Twitter and are bold and uncompromising, which makes for great statements and table chatter. This was written with only their Teaser episode released, but you can expect no shortage of pop culture references, fashion discussion, NHL wives and girlfriends (WAG) and pet content, along with team analysis. It’s trailblazing for a group of females in Vancouver to start their own podcast that’s hockey-focused, meant to be a casual chat amongst friends. They know the team, know their media, can gossip, and are having fun with it.
Twitter | Instagram | Listen
The Broadscast is officially LIVE!! 🎙 Just 5 girls and some light-hearted hockey talk with a soap opera twist. Catch our teaser episode NOW on your podcast medium of choice!https://t.co/91KE8LnOJE pic.twitter.com/XH0fIfhmHy
— The Broadscast (@BroadscastPod)
July 27, 2020
PUCKS ON NET
Founded: September 2013
Players: Ryan Schaap (@schaaptop), Geeta Reddy (@geetanjalireddy), Paul McLellan (@McLellanPaul), Dave McPhail (@PucksOnDave)
Premise: The group of 4 has created a casual, honest atmosphere with their roundtable conversation. They’re good friends, which equates to great camaraderie. They run a ‘contradictory’ fantasy hockey league and don’t talk ‘fancy stats’ (while still being very knowledgeable). I think they’re engaged with their listeners, and relatable as human beings amongst their talk of Tim Hortons NHL trading cards, player safety, current signings and acquisitions, and Green Day at the All-Star Game. Reaching 7 years of consistent hockey talk and recapping the team’s evolution is a feat in its own.
Twitter | Patreon | Instagram | Listen
And on Sunday, Ryan sat down with his old man for Father's Day to talk about growing up playing minor hockey in Calgary, bonding over the Vancouver #Canucks and even his words of wisdom when it comes to talking to your kids about drugs.https://t.co/BaQFM53Yws
— PUCKS ON NET (@Pucksonnetca)
June 24, 2020
The Canucks Conversation
Founded: November 2018
Players: Chris Faber (@ChrisFaber39), David Quadrelli (@Quadrelli)
Premise: Faber was joined by Quads in 2020, and the pair has perhaps the most praised local podcast so far. They’re both BCIT Radio Arts and Entertainment students (and writers for CanucksArmy), and their dedication, preparedness, branding and reporting level are top notch. They break down topics with great chemistry and perception - roster moves, Nikita Tryamkin, Olli Juolevi, and the Judd Brackett situation. Some of their notable guests include Utica Comets Kole Lind and Brogan Rafferty, and ‘bionic’ Finn Sami Salo.
Twitter | Patreon | Instagram | Listen
🎉SURPRISE! 🎉 Episode 91: “Jake Jets out of the lineup” ft.@CraigJButton We dropped our episode early! Craig Button stops by to chat about the NHL and #Canucks prospects. We breakdown the exhibition game against the Jets & some exciting news at the end!https://t.co/NMWBVOU7ko
— Canucks Conversation Podcast (@CanucksConvo)
July 30, 2020
Canucks & Pucks
Founded: April 2019
Players: Matthew Zator (@MatthewZatorSC)
Premise: Matthew Zator, writer for The Hockey Writers and Hockey Ops Director at Overtime Heroics, made a return to the airwaves this past July (after a lengthy regular season hiatus). Since getting back up and running, it’s full steam ahead – Zator has been joined by contributors from The Hockey Writers, The Canuck Way, college hockey newsletter Fresh Ice, and fellow podcast hosts. He has good insight and as a writer who goes into depth about NHL draft picks, the Vancouver Giants, and both the Nucks’ positives and negatives in his work, it gets noticeably transferred to the on-air conversation.
Twitter | Listen
🚨 NEW EPISODE 🚨 Episode 7 ft @CanuckClay, @JDsays2much, and @BaileyAJohnson_! - #Canucks & #mnwild with Jack & Clay - Will Lockwood and Quinn Hughes with Bailey - The Mailbag segment debuts and of course news from the #NHL and @TheHockeyWriter! #THW https://t.co/lW9FQms35P
— Canucks & Pucks Podcast 🏒🎙️ (@CanucksPucks)
July 28, 2020
Canucks Speakeasy
Founded: August 2019
Players: Pete Edwards (@pete_gas), Doug (@dougvenn)
Premise: Pete and Doug are 2 “mildly educated Canucks die-hards” who chat about current team news and trending topics. They’ve covered trade talk, the Collective Bargaining Agreement, prospects at the World Juniors, scouting, and the BLM movement. They’re occasionally joined by guests including podcast friends, and fellow fans/Tweeters Chris Conte, Jenna Fabulous and Ray Hatt.
Twitter | Listen
We're back with Episode 37: Powderkeg. Playoffs, play-ins, Judd and BLM are all discussed. Give'r a listen!https://t.co/dwoEQVNudThttps://t.co/7ZSogAjWsuhttps://t.co/r5HqX26czU pic.twitter.com/QKScnR9Q6G
— Canucks Speakeasy (@CanucksSpeak)
June 4, 2020
The LarschCast
Founded: June 2019
Players: Tej Dhaliwal (@DrTejDhaliwal), Sat Oberoi (@SatOberoi), Nav Dosanjh (@NavDosanjh1983), Ryan Cassels (@cassels_music)
Premise: The Larschcasters are known for their entertaining banter and debates, mostly on hockey and a little NFL. They’ve picked the minds of seasoned media (Scott Oake, James Duthie, Joey Kenward), legendary broadcaster Jim Robson, and former Canucks Kirk McLean, Chris Higgins and Shane O’Brien. They’ve been generating healthy content during the pandemic, including a spirited debate with Minnesota Wild podcast hosts, discussing media personnel moves, prospects, NHL Award contenders, and the toxicity in the Vancouver Canucks market. In June, they released a special with hockey coach/trainer Jennifer Chefero, sharing her story facing sexual abuse and harassment in her career, while candidly discussing women’s rights and sports culture.
Twitter | Facebook | Listen
Episode 61 ft. @hustlerama!#NHLJets centric epi, with an outlook of the Jets vs #flames. Not a lot of love for Calgary in this one😬. Also insights into the #nhlbubble, before ending with #Canucks talk & Rapid Larsch! 🍎:https://t.co/vZ2lyQ9zoO Spotify: https://t.co/XdV1y3ls7V
— The LarschCast (@larschcast)
July 29, 2020
The PP1 Podcast
Founded: October 2019
Players: Brayden Ursel (@bkursel23), Ted (@tee3ree), Ryan Hank (@always90four)
Premise: A tagline like “three guys from Kelowna bringing the heat and spitting the takes” doesn’t need further explanation. Appearing at the beginning of this season, the podcast (which features writers from The Canuck Way and CanucksArmy) has had some nice guests like the Canucks inaugural captain Orland Kurtenbach, retired centre and current Kelowna Rockets Assistant Coach Vern Fiddler, and Paul “Biznasty” Bissonnette. They’ve been nominated for Kelowna Now’s Best Local Podcast, and have a ‘Dudes and Guys’ segment where they pit 2 players against one another and talk it out (criteria is debatable).
Twitter | Listen
Episode 46: Bouncy Castles, Boeser Bombshells, & Backchecking w/ @mattsekeres. We chat Boeser rumours, cap crunch, Rathbone, Tryamkin, Markstrom, Sundin vs. Vanek, the best cold-open since Nikolay Goldobin, and how you can win a #Canucks jersey. https://t.co/KouGJr6GKH
— The PP1 PODCAST (@ThePP1Podcast)
July 15, 2020
The SCT Show
Founded: September 2018
Players: Nam Mann (@CanuckAgent007), Tanbir Rana (@TRana87)
Premise: SCT is Strictly Canucks Talk. Aside from reminiscing about ‘where were you when’ pivotal moments in franchise history occurred and the regular shop talk of performance and #NamStats, they draw in guests to talk about trade value (The Athletic’s Harman Dayal) and stickhandling (specialist/trainer Pavel Barber). They’ve also hosted local defenceman and last year’s 4th overall draft pick Bowen Byram, and hockey analyst/retired winger Anson Carter for a chat about the pressure of the market in Vancouver and the Sedins. Like any good heated debate, there are also trade and Team Tank vs Playoffs scenarios.
Twitter | Listen
.@CanuckAgent007 has a proposal to get Loui Eriksson off the #Canucks books 🤔 EP 14 - Links below ⬇️ 🍎 https://t.co/Z9snNdSuI1 📱 https://t.co/AJILh0IaWJ pic.twitter.com/LZblDE8GLW
— The SCT Show (@SCTShow)
July 17, 2020
Johnny Canuck Talk
Founded: August 2019
Players: Adrian J. Haug (@adrianjhaug), Roy Styles (@roy_styles)
Premise: Takes from 2 arm chair GM’s, the pair discuss a wide variety of topics like losing streaks, hockey safety, report cards, line-ups, and trade deadline. They’ve also shared an insightful chat with Harman Dayal (The Athletic) about his career and the late and great Jason Botchford. It’s laid-back and conversational, with mentions of farmers’ tans, celebrating birthdays during quarantine, and the school system strung across introductions. What’s cool is they record the podcast from near and far away places – Kamloops, BC and Germany (!).
Twitter | Listen
(1) Episode 37 is uploading now! @roy_styles and I talk #Canucks #hockey and @Canucks topics, issues, news, etc. We also talk about the incredible impact our Jim Carey impressions have had on our wives. Yikes. Featuring tweets from: @Canuckgirl20 @TSN1040 @DanRiccio650 pic.twitter.com/6oA7mZh6jb
— Johnny Canuck Talk (@JohnnyCanuckPod)
June 28, 2020
1 This list is not exhaustive, but there is something for everyone and I hope you find your Canucks fix. There can be an argument made that the podcast market is oversaturated, but I like to see it as an opportunity for any fan or audio bird to let their voice be heard! So, don’t be negative about it.
Posted by: Chloe Hoy
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wolfliving · 5 years
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On the subject of Making
From: Garnet Hertz
I made a Google Form to collect ideas in regards to an organization to fill the gap left after Make threw in the towel and closed their doors. The full responses are included below. At this point, it looks like something will be organized for sure... or at least I'll be starting up something. Thanks to Mitch Altman, Karen Marcelo and members of Nettime for sharing. There are piles of good ideas here: which of these do you think are the most important?
Here are the raw, unedited responses to the question "If you were running an open source maker-oriented organization that filled the gap left by Maker Media ceasing operations, how would you run it and what would you focus on?"
76 responses:
• Model it after dorkbot but instead of having meetings it can be geared around smaller regional Faires
• I would run it as a non profit and make sure that there are people from all over the world representing. Not only so US focused.
• Focus on low tech and tech critism...as much as possible far from western culture...let say the gambiara creative movement in LATAM (brazil) or Cuban style repair culture guerilla, community envisioned and run publications/workshops/happenings without the 'red tape' so often discussed as part of the Maker Media legacy. so, no forced branding, no forced commonalities (other than perhaps a shared manifesto), no minimum number of participants or fundraising requirement for it to be a 'real' event of the community, and much less of a focus on attracting, and then satisfying, corporate sponsors.
• Should be about critical making, open source, skill sharing, critical thinking and more...
• I think the most important thing is to help local people meet up with each other in person. This should go far beyond people who already go to a hackerspace - this is something that Make did well by bringing together all sorts of people from children, university students, hackers, artists, etc. I don't think this has to be large scale.
• Member-run co-operative; leadership positions only for women; women-only days; focus on understanding biases built into technologies and imagining ways around this (critical technical practice)
• Money. Without money you can’t go far
• Projects how tos. Wait. That's Instructables. Never mind.
• cats, and i'd not run it... i would do unconferences, get space, and allow people, provide limited scheduling facilities.
• Support groups with least access to money, education, and resources to setup, lead, and run such an entity.
• I would focus on local groups with local, f2f contacts and a (funding-)mechanism to facilitate the exchange of primarily people as visiting makers instead data-platforming and global marketing.
• A mostly decentralised movement that prioritises shared ideas over branding, focusing on providing easy-access models for small, local communities to start shared spaces and hold events.
• I'd make an organisation of organisations, and invite contributions from different organisations. If I was making a publication, I think I'd go with an interview format and I'd interview two or more organisations at once - inviting them to discuss their operations, their experiences and their hopes, together.
• Ideally, a new organization would be a resource, and not an organization. I think open-source maker communities are singular to the their local communities and their local interests. A global community that allowed the specificity of local/regional interests to shine is more important to me than an 'engineered' (imposed?) idea of maker-dom. I enjoyed the broad definition of making that Maker Media cast, but I think the organization was actually dominated by specific technologies and approaches to technology. I'd like to see an organization that could get past that.
• I would focus on positive technology that attempts to help us instead of just consumer goods
• Community building by featuring projects by makers through events and publications.
• I'm not sure if it needs a replacement, aren't the maker faires run independently? Also a printed magazine isn't something that many technology interested people buy in 2019. A website that collects nice projects and tutorials would be enough.
• Education of kids. the best energy seemed to be in helping people learn
• On content by the community (electronic media) and events
• I would run it as a collective that will use their power to make an impact in society. Use the power of us, humans to make our home planet better. I would focus on philosophy and ideas, since ideas are bulletproof and no one can’t take them away.
• n my market no matter the name of a brand, people do not come because the brand comes to create community
• Non-profit, volunteer-based, brutally and radically self-sustaining.
• a bit like hackaday but with a broader focus
• Celebrating and sharing builds.
• I currently part of a maker oriented NGO in Mexico, and our experience is that there are a lot of oportunities to fund and create open content. We get funds from bigger organizations like USAID, Save theCHildren and others to fund open programs like meteorito.io or robolution,mx, that anyone who speak spanish can use.
• Sustainability is challenge. What happened to Maker Media will happen again if you are a single entity trying to make ends meet. I would rather take a different approach. More about it below.
• I would still run it as a media and marketing company. Similar to how many makerspaces stay funded by offering production, design and development services utilizing their existing resources to for-profit companies. By providing some form of value-added business in a tangential indistry separate from the niche maker media was filling, (I know, you had the magazine, but magazines aren't big money makers these days. I'm thinking of something like a peer-to-peer lending platform that allows makerspaces and small businesses to fund expansion or a marketing and development support agency and platform that sells a specific set of services or products. ) that then turns around and uses it's profits to fund the sort of programs Maker Media was running. Does it suck to end up spending 80% of your time designing a UX system for a loan platform instead of planning maker faires? Yep. But a separate business organization that just has a charter to provide funding for a maker-centric organization out of it's profits can survive a bad turn a lot easier than the two being the same organization.
• Reach out to schools and do lots of mini fairies and training to get kids ready for the faire...
• Youth and education. If you inspire the next generation you guarantee longevity.
• I would not take VC. I would make an education and technology outreach non profit. I would make it just an events company, focussing on a few big, profitable events in a year in less expensive locations plus smaller community events. It doesn't have to make a killing, just enough to make ends meet.
• I am always more interested in seeing what strange things individuals make instead of groups.
• alternative energy
• I'd focus on reaching kids who don't have a ton of money, and teaching them how to get started on a shoestring in the world of making. Stop with satellite design and get into how to use openscad, how to tune a budget printer, things like that. Maybe teach people how to bring this stuff into schools and get started there. Maybe showcase some kids programming stuff each issue.
• Exclusive: Magazine, limited pre-release hardware, baubles. Growth: YouTube
• As a non profit.
• Focus on education to the widest audience. Not sure of the best model for running.
• A shared interest organization like Foundation or Cooperation on regional based clusters. Focus should be on life long learning and sharing resources and knowledge.
• Not For Profit - Focus on inclusion and education of the core making skills that are developed through designing, building and coding.
• coop, not too pricy, but not free
• Accessible workshops and showcases of diverse creators.
• Event organization to have people meeting all together
• A web/editorial site, with a modest branching off to video. I would not do the maker fairies and events because I am not good at event planning. But I would TOTALLY love to go to some more maker faires as both an attendee, and a presenter
• Building projects together as a group.
• I would run it with the goal of educating and providing tools to communities regarding electronics and maker skills
• Non-profit. Non-exclusive. Encouraging. Run by a team who think deeply about the impacts of their actions and go to great lengths to learn both in their areas of personal interest and in areas that are for the good of the global community.
• Non-profit with a benevolent dictator. Org holds the brand, collects grants, and gives out money city by city to recognize what people are already doing. The org would also certify maker educational content and products as a revenue stream through an open access review process, similar to academic journal reviewing. That said, primary focus would be on building awareness.
• Online daily content(curating from sources worldwide), long term brand partnership, spotlight on the makers themselves, low on staff- use local partners for all events
• how to run an organization is a question for an online poll?, I don't know even how to cook
• i would focus on keeping on supporting the community
• Creativity, diversity, inclusivity
• I run a Bangalore based social business by the name of "Makespace and Open Source Creativity" (www.bangaloremakepsace.org) and we are fully sustainable and have been operating successfully for the last 5 years. We gain revenues by hosting and conducting workshops for the local maker community as well as organize multiple events where the maker community can come together, collaborate in real time, and create connections to start their own "maker ventures". We focus on the "social business" model so it avoids incurring massive debts and costs. Everything is volunteer driven.
• The way it was run isn't a problem. It wasn't a leadership issue,it was a lack of sponsorship.The big tech companies didn't care anymore. Perhaps big events should be nixed in exchange for small local maker faire events.
• Let the healthy events operate themselves. Create a minimalist amount of requirements.
• Forming a non-profit board would be the first step. I personally like consensus-based models like the Circle Way with traditional models like Parlimentary procedure used as needed. I think major focus should be placed on education (NOT just for kids!), supporting novel technologies and models especially when it comes to sustainability, and providing access to the tools, skills and mindsets behind making to diverse communities.
• I subscribed to their magazine once and while I found it interesting, everything seemed a bit advanced and over my head. It would help if they had some material for beginners.
• Make it a playground open for all
• I imagine that organization embedded inside individual educational institutions and organisation. That way it becomes financially sustainable and viable.
• It'd continue to run and focus on education.
• Too tough to answe succinctly , maker faire
• Community is the critical component, and events like Maker Faire have been amazing places to visit that help keep the community active and contributing even when remote.
• Critical social maker issues.... improving urban environments, developing countries, citizen infrastructure solutions
• I would operate with advocacy and accessibility in mind. I would focus on how the maker movement can provide opportunity and equity to people underserved by institutionally-oriented models of production, research and business. I would look for opportunities not only to generate and platform content to this end, but also to find synergy with peers and indies. I would seek to publish quality instructional material, and also journalism on the maker community. I think a guiding principle should be elevating the maker movement's reach and relevancy in local economies.
• If i were? I think, I am
• I believe that Maker Faire actually had difficulty in getting makers to register over time because of bad feelings due to the fact that the business model was for-profit but MF gave no equity to the makers, who are literally the reason for the event. I would hope that such a future organization would be not-for-profit. In the long term, maybe it could even sponsor makers with projects of enormous scope.
• An open source franchise model with a common virtual platform to share "how-to", technical help forums, show and tell, etc. This should be supported with low member fee. Also needed are blueprints on how to have a brick and morter makerspace connecting into the franchise model.
• Would change the name, like Tech or DIY meetups.
• Membership based, maybe with organizational members (like hackerspaces) • 501c3, The community
• My favorite part of Maker Media was the Maker Faires.
• Considering the raise of streaming platforms as YouTube, I would focus on keep doing content and publish or online, keeping the already big community around Maker media.
• Kids first, then hobbyists
• Stop trying to claim the word "Make" as IP and focus on enabling and building the community through faires, meetups, clubs, forums, talks, etc. Give makers a place to go to meet each other, and an audience for their works. Don't promote "maker tax" businesses, but show how DIY can be cheap enough for everybody. Less STEM, less kids, more technical.
• I would run it as a distributed co-op, focussing on sustainability and radical change.
• I'd focus on highlighting the work of underrepresented folks from the start. Without conscious effort, it's easy to show a fairly homogeneous subset of the community.
These are the raw/unedited responses for the question "If you had to pick only one thing for an open source maker-oriented organization to focus on, what would it be?"
• Community
• Smaller annual festivals (east bay maker Faire is a good size) organizing small gatherings so makers can meet makers
• check out OPEN BIDOUILLE CAMP
• maximising the good maker/craft engagements already happening on the grassroots level, rather than taking credit for them.
• Curating
• Small local events for people to show their projects and meet each other.
• Feminism
• Anything and Everything - once the money part of the game is taken care of. Without money, there is no chance to make
• Project how tos. Ugh.
• cats
• For making to focus on local need.
• I would focus on facilitating small-to-medium group ownership of open source projects as common-pool resources.
• Increasing diversity of the maker community by lowering the barrier to entry (financially, geographically, socially).
• Sustainability & Engagement. Yes, I know it looks like two things, but it's not. By this I don't just mean environmental sustainability, I also mean economic and social sustainability: Who's engaged? How is that broadened over time? And how does the organisation sustain itself? In many cases, the answer to "How does the organisation sustain itself?" will lead, by implication, to answering the question "Who is engaged?". (eg: A fablab that's in the orbit of a university will tend only to engage students! eg2: A glossy magazine about the "maker lifestyle" will tend only to engage middle class makers.)
• empowerment
• Teaching self sufficiency
• Ensuring at least one big event was happening annually to get makers together showing their projects.
• Accumulate interesting and useful projects, ideas etc.
• Helping kids create
• Events
• The idea that we can hack the planet for good
• in the community and not in the brands
• Facilitating cooperation, since this is the main thing that individual/independent makers lack in comparison to larger (corporate) structures.
• tutorials
• Celebrating and sharing builds
• Content creation
• Education and Outreach, I think the Make magazine and books were a great enablers.
• By far, I would pair down to just operating a online news site and the maker faires. I'd look at how Cracked brought itself back from the dead as an example.
• Tools to train kids to put on makerfaires
• Support the demonstrating makers
• Outreach focussed events - big ones and community ones. • These events have *enormous* impact on human beings and can make money.
• alternative energy
• Education and levelling the playground socially. This stuff doesn't have to be stupid expensive.
• YouTube
• Events
• Continue the magazine at all costs. It is the source of inspiration for many of all ages.
• Free physical and virtual spaces for learning and creation for all.
• STEAM focused. Especially for school aged children
• micro circuts
• accessible workshops and online materials
• free as in beer
• Community. I don't know how to foster that and not make it all about the money. It's hard because people make cool things and they want to get paid but "community" and "ceaseless self promotion " do not go well together
• Picking some project, and building it as a group with looking at the different elements of engineering, social science and acceptance, and presenting it to a different audience.
• Electrical engineering
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion of varied experience, culture, ideas, and methods.
• Right to repair to build more awareness around making
• Daily online content, but I think going diverse is safer
• I think I would like to focus in providing opportunities for makers that want to teach to teach, for example, I would love to teach programming for free, but havent found the space to do so
• community
• Community. Hands-down. There are many ways to address "Community" but it's the one thing I would pick over other characteristics like "Profit", "Longevity" or "Infrastructure" with respect to an open source maker-oriented organization
• Keep it small, nimble. Cater to the creativity of children, and keep it family friendly.
• Being not for profit.
• Providing access to the tools, skills and mindsets behind making to diverse communities.
• Wow, is that possible? :). I guess Arduino since you can do so many things with it.
• Let neither startup hype/pitch competition people nor social justice/identity politics people grab control over the space.
• Education and accessible technology for all
• Education
• Maker faire
• Community-organized events like Maker Faire I think are the one thing that allowed Maker Media to stand out
• critical approaches to design
• It is hard to pick one answer. I think there are several compelling opportunities for maker organizations focused on specific domains. One would be presenting maker skills in the context of a path to the trades. Another focus would be modernizing (and miniaturizing) common manufacturing processes outside the usual footprint of CNC technologies. I also believe there are a lot of opportunities for makers in agriculture and primary productivity - this is my own personal focus right now.
• Decentralization
• Whimsy. Maker businesses are fine, but there's nothing like the exhibits that elicit pure joy, which are made just because they can be made.
• Access to affordable maker spaces.
• Electronics DIY
• Regional events! Maker Faire Detroit has been so important for connecting makers in the midwest to each other and the rest of the country.
• Community building
• Events -- getting Makers together to talk, teach/share skills, show off their stuff.
• Creaste short videos that detect an issue in a community that could be somehow solved making some artifact, explain the creation process and show the impact it made.
• Physical computing
• Creating user controlled and built technological devices.
• Sustainability!! Many people are already afraid of the future, without knowing what they can do to improve matters. Be a beacon of hope. But also, as things move forward, there will be a lot of demand for this type of solutions. Renewable energy, repurposing/upcycling, interesting ways to produce food, and more. • social capacity building
Lastly, here are responses to the question "Any other thoughts or ideas?" (I've edited out some people's private contact information here, other than that these are the raw responses). Which ones resonate with you?
• the main ideas should realy come from the third world....they are way much more advance
• happy to get involved in helping build this - just let me know :) @c------- / [email protected]
• b-- here. I think the zine, + on demand + downloadable format would be great. Riso !!!
• Thanks Garnet!
• Maybe a how to magazine of critical and speculative design projects?
• well... another metaphor for cats is academia, or herding cats. other • For the organisation to be a meeting space for other locally focused groups not necessarily attached to making to encourage cross fertilisation of ideas.
• "Makers" are people, and community is people -- and we should eschew the platforming tendencies by single individuals, be it TechShop, Fab Lab, Maker Media, P2P, ecology ...
• And as I said earlier, together with m------:
"Shared Machine Shops are not new
Fab Labs are not about technology.
Sharing is not happening. Hackerspaces are not open. Technology is not neutral. Hackerspaces are not solving problems. Fab Labs are not the seeds of a revolution." (http://peerproduction.net/iss…/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/) P---- T------, [email protected]
• Great thoughts and ideas on Nettime. Keep up the good work! Hope to see you again IRL some time. J----
• No DARPA grants
• Open source is a strange thing to focus on. There are many maker companies that eschew open source, and many that require retention of copyright, etc. I wonder why you chose this phrasing.
• Be political neutral, don't force political opinions on people like the left wing Make magazine did.
• I am not sure I am right. This is just my gut reaction.
• Being a “maker” is a way of living based that we can hack everything for better :) we can be better, we have to.
• The maker movement is more alive and latent than ever.
• A post Maker Media organization should imho be membership-based, with membership revenue being the basis of what is possible financially. It would be a kind of global trade organization for makers of all kinds.
• HACK OTHER EVENTS: Attend events that attract makers who don't identify as makers: comicon (almost everyone is a maker there), wood and metalworking trade shows, custom car and bike shows, etc. We grow our community by joining other communities and infecting them with our enthusiasm for blending the disciplines into one big community of makers.
• I think building an alliance or consortium that brings together various organizations and individual is much better idea. The group could consist of organizations who's business is cater to maker community (open hardware companies, open source companies).
• I think the problem you're always going to run into is an issue of that the maker community has always struggled a bit with the idea of business as a part of the movement. At its core, the movement is a hobby to most people, so the vast majority of maker organizations have to or prefer to rely on outside sources of support because if you try to fund a makerspace internally and make business an integral part of it, it just becomes another factory workshop. I don't think it works if the organization funding it is the same one as the organization trying to coordinate the non-profit programs.
• Kinda like a national science faire but more maker oriented.
• S----- H--- is severely underrated and print is dead.
• MF, by it's very nature sort of made it hard for individuals to show stuff because it was just too exhausting. I would like to see a better way to do show and tell among individuals.
• this really sucks!!!!
• We don't need so much focus on Bay Area-type artists. We need to teach people, and especially kids, how to get started for themselves, and then help them develop skills.
• Support the independent makers. They are the "talent".
• For years heard many smaller maker companies lamenting that it was too expensive to participate in a maker Faire. It was a of once a maker made the leap from maker to a maker business Make Media wanted large sums of money to have a booth/representation at an event. This amount was unproportionally large compared to the revenue the business generated. And it all makes sense why the prices were so high when there were venture capitalists that needed to see returns. Treat it the new "Make" as a company of one, then it'll succeed long term. https://ofone.co/ (no, not affiliated with the book in any way)
• Makers are strongly connected to the UN SDG's - find ways to mutual development.
• Co-create strong independent networks, portals, platforms to survive autonomy in times of crises: Signal, Protonmail, etc
• Developing of the next generation of Makers should be something that should span more than just print and digital media. Deeper integration into schools, K12 and Collegiate, to help develop the skills needed to live and work in an Internet connected, coded world.
• do not try to be too big
• I've taken the time to carve out more space in my life to make things now that Make is gone. It felt like they had a handle on the whole making things deal. And that level of fit and finish isn't really my style. I feel like I have more space to just be me and do what I want. I know this is all in my head. I really want the books to continue under a similar imprint. It'd be a shame if they were all discontinued or sold to some soulless corporation.
• More drones!
• Women are makers, and “women’s crafts” are forms of making. People living in poverty are makers, and survival invention in developing nations is a form of making. Learn from Bauhaus’s eff-ups a century ago. Learn from innovation in literal ghettos and tenements.
• "making" is too broad to go mainstream. Folks that grok makerfaire dig it hard, yet folks that don't have no clue what the hell it is. We have a big awareness problem still. Rally around right to repair and teaching folks how to fix stuff so they start taking more stuff apart and questioning how it works.
• If I had the means to start I'd do it myself
• I am sorry to waste your time
• usually monetery and community focussed efforts conflict. it would be great if this was not the case
• Occasional events are better for outreach whereas regular meetups are better for cultivating a specialism
• Consider expanding the Maker Media empire, or whatever is left of it, to the Eastern Hemisphere/East -- India and China are the future, and if Make: had some of its outposts in these economies, radical change could be seen with respect to the global maker movement
• Nothing good lasts forever. Design the business accordingly.
• I attended probably 75% of the NYC MFs, including 2010. I believe the year things changed for the worse was when Barnes&Noble got involved, makers started complaining about the cost to exhibit, and weird unrelated large sponsors showed up (some kind of new soda). The reprap festivals might be a better way to go?
• I think it makes sense at this point to look at how we can form a network of small groups in many places working together towards a common mission with the support of a board providing guidance.
• How, and with whom, can I accomplish this in Reutlingen, Willi Betz Gelände?
• I know people are super sad about MAKE. Me too. It's very nostalgic considering all the friends and community we have made all around the world. But I feel, this is just the passing of an industry from the early stage to a mature stage. This is very similar to all the open source hardware grassroots clubs we had such as the famous Homebrew Club, but today people hardly build computers by hand anymore. We have "matured" into another level of technology.
• It's a cycle. What starts young, will one day become matured and even die off to give birth to something else totally new, while the remnants of the old will get embedded as part of bigger and more financially stable organisations.
• connect up all loal hackerspaces in a city and have them run an event in a conglomeration.
• One thing I feel is lacking in the usual maker pedagogy is fundamental business literacy. People can develop amazing skills through self-study, but business law is arcane by design. 
• I think most makers stand to benefit greatly from some content demystifying business licensing, home accounting and independent consultancy work. There are already many organizations promoting independent business, but there seems to be little overlap between these and the maker community.
• The maker faire is a decentralized thing. Most of regional and mini maker faires are on. Perhaps instead of maker Media licenses we could just use a respected and recognized chapter, a document stating what is a maker faire and what is not. If the maker faire trademark will not be available for us, then we will have to think up and to agree on a new name.
• We can do better than Maker Faire.
• If there is a open source franchise model then each location could have a contributed fee that would assist with purchasing of new equipment, insurance, repairs, staffing etc. • It is a lower-cost way of sharing resources instead of having to rely solely on local volunteers or individual sites.
• Half focus on newcomers and other half in veterans. A lot of us started with Arduino, and some made custom PCB, wich is kinda normal.
• Not for profit please :D
• Get youtubers involved, like Simone Giertz, Laura Kampf, Mark Rober,
• Be an actual maker movement, about DIY and tech learning and FUN!, and not a profit-focused startup company. Be genuinely excited about making, not fake excited about selling us marked up crap. Get into the deep dive details. 
• Be more like the 8/16 bit computer user group days, the Radio and Electronics days, the glee of building and fixing and modding shit. Be photocopied zine days and not glossy magazine days. More crazy tinkerers, less TED talk. Don't be a fucking TED talk. Never be that again.
• Scrappy and inclusive, not hipster and exclusive. Geezers and kids and adults and teens all treated with respect. 
• For god's sake, the project is the star! Fuck "influencers". Nobody is a fucking star of makerdom. 
• Engineering is modest, good hacks get kudos. No hate for n00bs. Everybody can come. You can do the thing!
• Make did an amazing job of combining different disciplines into one community. I'd love to see that again.
• stress anti-capitalist and regenerative capitalist models
If you'd like to input ideas, here's the form - 
https://forms.gle/SB7FxpJVAyhVwnLp7 
- and in reference to Nettime, I'm particularly interested in hearing people (by email) that might be interested in hosting some sort of events that have to do with DIY/art/tech/culture, sort of in the spirit of a revived Dorkbot - please give me a shout.
Thanks! Garnet
See More from Molly Hankwitz
-- Dr. Garnet Hertz Canada Research Chair in Design and Media Arts Emily Carr University of Art and Design 520 East 1st Avenue, Vancouver, BC, Canada  V5T 0H2
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission #  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected] #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
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thiscitylife · 6 years
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How Urbanists Can Fight Extremism
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“People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.”
In the influential novel, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam documented declining civic engagement in America since the 1960s and predicted how it would breed extremism, threatening the future of democracy and community.
According to political scientist Anthony O'Halloran, extremism happens when people cannot think outside their own limited view of social and political reality.
“There is no real discussion. Rather, one is presented with pre-programmed answers. There is a strong them-and-us mentality. Empathizing with others who are different in either their thoughts or actions is simply impossible.”
Today, we are in that reality. America and other western democratic nations are descending into extremist ideologies around race, immigration, gun control, religion and human rights. According to Putnam, some of the crumbling of strong community bonds in America may be the bi-product of the rise of urban sprawl, which urbanists today are trying to address by promoting walkable communities.
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Since the 1960s, Americans have increasingly moved to socially and ethnically homogeneous, car-dependent suburban areas. According to Putnam, the proliferation of more and more ‘‘lifestyle enclaves’’’ has reduced social conflict that once brought people out into the public arena.
Along with the reduced possibility of encountering neighbours different from oneself, which I have written about with the rise of gated communities, suburbia has also reduced the time people spend talking to each other. Americans increasingly drive to work alone and for long periods of the day. On arriving home from work after being stuck in traffic, they are more likely to zone out indoors watching television and social media rather than participate in community-building activities.
Urbanists - those who study, work on and create urban societies - are community builders by nature. They pride themselves on their passion for building inclusive, vibrant communities, and they have a critical role in combating extremism. This role is often underestimated, so I have compiled a list of how urbanist ideas and goals promote strong communities.
Promote Walkable Communities -  When I am walking around my neighbourhood, I have the opportunity to meet my neighbours, talk to local shopkeepers, dog walkers and parents, and run into friends. This does not happen when I am in my car. Ever. A recent Globe and Mail article by Andre Picard outlines the benefits of walkable communities:
“If you want healthy communities.....you need to build inclusive, diverse spaces, where healthy runners and cyclists, parents pushing strollers, frail seniors with walkers, people using wheelchairs, street people, immigrant shop owners and pin-striped business types all feel at ease moving about and intermingling. Streets are the original and ultimate social network; you need to construct them  for culture and community-building.”
Walking not only connects us to others, it makes us feel better – emotionally, mentally and spiritually. Beyond personal wellness, it is good for the environment, crime prevention, community-building and the economy. In contrast driving is unhealthy, unsafe, anti-social activity done on a daily basis.
We can promote walkable communities by supporting the development of mixed use buildings, pedestrian infrastructure, traffic calming, compact homes, bike lanes and public transit.
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Photograph: Alamy
Provide Mixed, Affordable, Compact Housing - The way we engage in our communities is shaped by the homes we live in - how isolated they are, how much time and money we spend on them, and how close they are to parks, schools and transit. Urban planners need to focus on creating communities where people of all socioeconomic backgrounds live in close proximity to each other with a variety of different housing options. This means promoting initiatives such as co-op and social housing mixed with market housing and adding gentle density to single-family neighbourhoods.
Build an Abundance of Lively, Public Spaces and Amenities - Whether or not people live in small apartments or big gated communities, it’s human nature to want to get out and be around other people. Public spaces are where we are exposed to people of all backgrounds in a leisurely setting. They are the spaces where communities are formed. Urbanists must create an abundance of public spaces and amenities that are accessible and vibrant, like parks, plazas, parklets, play areas, public pools, libraries and community centres. For inspiration, here are some examples of the best public spaces around the world.
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Surrey hosts one of the world's largest Vaisakhi parades (Photo: City of Surrey)
Celebrate Diversity at Every Opportunity - Rainbow crosswalks. Washrooms that welcome transgendered people. Ethnic celebrations. Gay pride parades. Historic signage and street names acknowledging Indigenous languages and history. These are all examples of how urbanists can use public art, cultural celebrations and public facilities to celebrate the racial, religious and gender diversity of humankind.
Create Opportunities for Civic Engagement - People used to make time to show up at city council, participate in political demonstrations, write to their elected officials and above all, VOTE. Prior to the election of Donald Trump, civic engagement was on the decline. It might be on the rise following resistance to his extremist policies, but there are things that urbanists can do locally to promote civic engagement. This includes setting up mobile voter registration booths at public events, creating opportunities for people to engage on public projects in a variety of forms (e.g. family-friendly fun events and online surveys), and making it easier for people to speak at city council.
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Prioritize Child-Friendly Policies - Children represent humanity in its purest form. A city or community that doesn’t prioritize the needs of children is one that is likely also neglecting the needs of other vulnerable sectors of society, such as seniors and low-income families. Child-friendly cities are dense, walkable, bikeable, safe, have easy access to nature, amenties, schools, transit, and childcare, and elements of fun and whimsy.
Create Places for Protest - Citizens need places where they can safety demonstrate against policies they feel are unjust. Urbanists need to ensure that communities include large public spaces that are available for people to stage peaceful protests. In Vancouver, this was an important consideration in the redesign of the North Plaza of the Vancouver Art Gallery, renamed šxʷƛ̓ənəq Xwtl’e7énk Square. It remains a large open space conducive to the public protests it has hosted since the 1970s.
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A pro-choice protest in 1972 at the Vancouver Art Gallery (Photo: George Diack/Vancouver Sun)
Title photo: Monica Almeida/Reuters
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architectnews · 3 years
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Firstsite Colchester, Essex: Museum of the Year
Firstsite centre for the visual arts, Colchester Building, Architect, Rafael Viñoly England
Firstsite Colchester, Essex Building Award
22 Sep 2021
New Centre for the Visual Arts
Design: Rafael Viñoly Architects
Firstsite Is Winner Of £100,000 Art Fund Museum Of The Year 2021
photograph © Marc Atkins
Firstsite in Colchester, Essex
Firstsite in Colchester, Essex, is announced as Art Fund Museum of the Year 2021 this evening (21 September 2021). Sally Shaw, Director of Firstsite, was presented with the £100,000 prize – the largest museum prize in the world – by broadcaster Edith Bowman at a ceremony in the spectacular setting of the Science Museum, London.
Celebrating its 10th anniversary, Firstsite is a contemporary arts organisation showing a diverse mix of historic, modern and contemporary art from around the world in an inclusive environment. It has built a strong, critical reputation nurturing long and deep relationships with artists and the local community.
photograph : Jayne Lloyd
During the pandemic it mobilised at speed to support local people, lending its building to neighbouring charity, Community 360 to run a food bank. Within days of lockdown, Firstsite created activity packs which went on to feature over fifty artists and were downloaded by over 92,000 households. The organisation led on The Great Big Art Exhibition which encouraged people to display their own art in their windows during lockdown to create a nationwide gallery, and Michael Landy’s Welcome to Essex exhibition was enjoyed by thousands of visitors over the summer.
photograph © Marc Atkins
In response to Black Lives Matter, Firstsite commissioned Elsa James to make a downloadable work in solidarity and continued the Super Black festival celebrating black culture in Essex. Other significant initiatives have included My name is not Refugee, an Arts Council Collection exhibition curated by clients of Refugee Action Colchester, and Art For Life, an exhibition commissioned by the NHS with key workers to aid understanding of the impact of Covid-19 on mental health.
photograph © Richard Bryant
Jenny Waldman, Art Fund director and chair of the judges for Art Fund Museum of the Year, said, ‘We’re proud to announce Firstsite in Colchester as Art Fund Museum of the Year 2021. From inspiring everyone to turn their windows into a nationwide gallery during lockdown to feeding local kids in the school holidays, they are an outstanding example of innovation and integrity. At their core is powerful, engaged contemporary art, housed in a gallery that gives space for everyone, from artists to NHS staff to local families and refugee groups. They exceeded all our expectations. Here is a small organisation thinking big and caring for their local community. Here is excellence in Essex.’
photo © Marc Atkins
Fellow judge, Edith Bowman said, ‘Museums and galleries are a portal to infinite creative avenues. I’ve had the real pleasure of visiting each one of the five finalists. Words fail me at what they’ve done with tiny teams and budgets. What Firstsite has achieved is mind-blowing.’
The winner was one of five finalists. The other shortlisted museums were: Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry (Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland), Experience Barnsley (Barnsley, South Yorkshire, England), Thackray Museum of Medicine (Leeds, West Yorkshire, England) and Timespan (Helmsdale, Sutherland, Scotland).
Each of the other finalist museums receives a £15,000 prize in recognition of their achievements.
The members of this year’s judging panel are: Maria Balshaw, director of Tate and chair of the National Museum Directors’ Council; Edith Bowman, broadcaster; Katrina Brown, director of The Common Guild; Art Fund trustee; Suhair Khan, strategic projects lead at Google, artist Thomas J Price and Jenny Waldman, director of Art Fund.
photograph © Marc Atkins
The news was announced in a live broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, BBC News Channel and BBC iPlayer, presented by John Wilson.
Among the 250 guests at the event hosted by Jenny Waldman were the following artists: Jeremy Deller, Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Cornelia Parker, Yinka Shonibare and Clare Twomey. Guests also included leading figures from the world of arts and culture such as: Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Nadine Dorries; Director of the Science Museum Group, Ian Blatchford; Director of Tate, Maria Balshaw; Director of Wellcome Collection, Melanie Keen; Director of the Design Museum, Tim Marlow; Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts, Axel Rüger; Chair of Arts Council England, Nicholas Serota; and London’s Deputy Mayor for Culture, Justine Simons. Many other high-profile figures also attended such as: poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan; and Museum and Heritage Consultant, Sandra Shakespeare.
Art Fund, the UK’s national charity for art, awards Art Fund Museum of the Year annually to one outstanding museum. The 2021 edition reflects the resilience and imagination of museums throughout the pandemic. At this moment of museums re-opening and starting their recovery, the 2021 prize highlights and rewards the extraordinary and innovative ways in which museums have, over the past year, served and connected with their communities against all the odds, even when some have had to close their physical spaces for the greater part of the year. Art Fund Museum of the Year is the largest museum prize in the world.
photograph © Marc Atkins
#museumoftheyear
Art Fund Museum of the Year 2021 Finalists
The Art Fund Museum of the Year 2021 finalists were:
Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry The Centre for Contemporary Art has been exhibiting emerging artists from Northern Ireland alongside international peers since 1992. Today CCA creates opportunities for audiences to experience ambitious, experimental and engaging contemporary art and supports the development of artists through commissions, solo and group exhibitions, public programmes, artist residencies, alongside its own publishing programme.
In the past year, it has supported 65 artists with paid for opportunities including social media takeovers, as well as developing its CCA Supports programme. This includes an online platform providing artists with information on emergency support through Government schemes and initiatives, crit groups and surgeries along with a series of Roundtable podcasts. Moreover, CCA has continued to engage with the community by displaying artwork in its windows. It presented the biennial exhibition URGENCIES 2021 in spaces across the city such as in shop windows, theatres and a shopping centre, and delivered activity packs to hundreds of schoolchildren, essential in an area of social deprivation.
Experience Barnsley Since opening in 2013, the collection at Experience Barnsley traces the known history of the borough from pre-historic times to the 21st century. Located in the iconic Town Hall and one of five Barnsley Museums sites, it is supported by thousands of local people who have shared their precious memories and objects, making up the displays in the Barnsley Story Gallery. As well as this there are spaces dedicated to changing, community created (temporary) exhibitions, such as the recent story of the Barnsley Canister Company as well as learning spaces and an archives centre.
Experience Barnsley’s recent digital activities, such as an online festival of archaeology, the daily digital jigsaw, and working with Ian McMillan, their Poet in Lockdown, has inspired local audiences to write poems, submit sketches and get creative, demonstrating how culture can make a difference to the local community with an increased digital reach to 17 million and an engagement of 942,000 across social media. In addition, thousands of care packages were sent to schools, care homes and local families through their partnerships, virtual trips to the pub kept communities connected and IT provision was catered for vulnerable groups.
Thackray Museum of Medicine The Thackray Museum of Medicine is the UK’s leading independent medical museum located between Europe’s largest teaching hospital and some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in West Yorkshire. The museum building first opened in 1861 as the purpose-built Leeds Union Workhouse. New buildings were gradually added to the workhouse complex including a separate infirmary, later to be renamed St James’s Hospital. By the 1990s, the old Leeds Union Workhouse building was considered unfit for modern medicine and Parliament gave permission for it to house the museum.
It now has a reimagined immersive visitor experience and, through a redisplay of the collections, eleven new galleries showing how people have triumphed over disease. It became the first museum in the pandemic to host a vaccination centre delivering 50,000 Pfizer vaccines. Tackling a range of medical subjects and enterprising outreach projects, the Thackray Museum has worked with schools to generate content to reinforce the science behind handwashing, created the online exhibition Mothers in Lockdown, and it became a locus for food distribution and converted an ambulance to carry out outreach projects around the city.
Timespan Located in the Scottish Highlands, Timespan comprises a local history museum, contemporary art programme, geology and herb gardens, shop, bakery and café. Timespan responds to urgent contemporary issues that are rooted in the local context of remote, rural Scotland, with a global and multi-disciplinary perspective to produce four projects a year, each aligned with broader social movements, alongside a programme of artist residencies. Timespan has operated as a social hub for the community during the pandemic and demonstrated a clear ambition for art and heritage.
In the past year, the exhibition Real Rights reframed local history within the intersection of climate change and colonialism. YASS (Youth Actions Social Squad) activity packs were sent to homes of local village children and tackled themes of social justice in creative ways, a consequence of which was the formation of a young gardeners’ association. Their online cooking show, Recipes for a Disaster, proved popular and featured local produce and producers.
Art Fund Museum of the Year
Art Fund has supported Museum of the Year since 2008. Its forerunner was the Prize for Museums and Galleries, administered by the Museum Prize Trust and sponsored by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation from 2003-2007. The prize champions what museums do, encourages more people to visit and gets to the heart of what makes a truly outstanding museum. The judges present the prize to the museum or gallery that has shown how their achievements of the preceding year stand out, demonstrated what makes their work innovative, and the impact it has had on audiences.
Winners 2008 – 2020
2008 – The Lightbox, Woking 2009 – Wedgwood Museum, Stoke-on-Trent 2010 – Ulster Museum, Belfast 2011 – British Museum 2012 – Royal Albert Memorial Museum 2013 – William Morris Gallery, London 2014 – Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield 2015 – Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester 2016 – Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London 2017 – The Hepworth, Wakefield 2018 – Tate St Ives 2019 – St Fagans National Museum of History, Cardiff
In a unique edition of the prize in 2020, Art Fund responded to the unprecedented challenges that all museums faced by sharing the prize money equally between five winners: Aberdeen Art Gallery; Gairloch Museum; Science Museum; South London Gallery; and Towner Eastbourne.
photograph © Marc Atkins
About Art Fund
Art Fund is the national fundraising charity for art. It provides millions of pounds every year to help museums to acquire and share works of art across the UK, further the professional development of their curators, and inspire more people to visit and enjoy their public programmes.
In response to Covid-19 Art Fund has made £3.6 million in urgent funding available to support museums through reopening and beyond, including Respond and Reimagine grants to help meet immediate need and reimagine future ways of working. Art Fund is independently funded, supported by the 131,000 members who buy the National Art Pass, who enjoy free entry to over 240 museums, galleries and historic places, 50% off major exhibitions, and receive Art Quarterly magazine. Art Fund also supports museums through its annual prize, Art Fund Museum of the Year. www.artfund.org
Previously on e-architect:
22 Sep 2011
firstsite Colchester
New Centre for the Visual Arts
Design: Rafael Viñoly Architects
firstsite, a major new centre for the visual arts, designed by internationally acclaimed Rafael Viñoly Architects, will open in Colchester on Sunday 25 September 2011.
photo : Richard Bryant/ arcaidimages.com
firstsite, Colchester centre for the visual arts design by Rafael Viñoly
Location: firstsite, Colchester, Essex, England, UK
Essex Building Designs
Essex Buildings
A House for Essex, England Design: FAT Architecture + Grayson Perry photo : Jack Hobhouse A House for Essex
Meadow House Design: Strom Architects rendering : Numa Meadow House Essex
Key contemporary Essex Buildings
Newhall Be, Harlow, north west Essex Design: Alison Brooks Architects photo : Paul Riddle Newhall Housing
Institute For Democracy and Conflict Resolution, University of Essex Daniel Libeskind University of Essex Institute For Democracy and Conflict Resolution
Stansted Airport, Stansted Foster + Partners Stansted Airport
Comments / photos for the Firstsite Colchester, Essex: Museum of the Year Building page welcome
The post Firstsite Colchester, Essex: Museum of the Year appeared first on e-architect.
0 notes
epackingvietnam · 4 years
Text
My 8 Best Local SEO Tips for the 2020 Holidays
Posted by MiriamEllis

Image credit: DoSchu
“No place like home for the holidays.” This will be the refrain for the majority of your customers as we reach 2020’s peak shopping season. I can’t think of another year in which it’s been more important for local businesses to plan and implement a seasonal marketing strategy extra early, to connect up with customers who will be traveling less and seeking ways to celebrate at home.
Recently, it’s become trendy in multiple countries to try to capture the old Danish spirit of hygge, which the OED defines as: A quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.
While this sometimes-elusive state of being isn’t something you can buy direct from a store, and while some shoppers are still unfamiliar with hygge by name, many will be trying to create it at home this year. Denmark buys more candles than any other nation, and across Scandinavia, fondness for flowers, warming foods, cozy drinks, and time with loved ones characterizes the work of weaving a gentle web of happiness into even the darkest of winters.
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
1) Survey customers now and provide what they want
Reasonably-priced survey software is worth every penny in 2020. For as little as $20/month, your local business can understand exactly how much your customers’ needs have changed this past year by surveying:
Which products locals are having trouble locating
Which products/services they most want for the holidays
Which method of shopping/delivery would be most convenient for them
Which hours of operation would be most helpful
Which safety measures are must-haves for them to transact with a business
Which payment methods are current top choices
Doubtless, you can think of many questions like these to help you glean the most possible insight into local needs. Poll your customer email/text database and keep your surveys on the short side to avoid abandonment.
Don’t have the necessary tools to poll people at-the-ready? Check out Zapier’s roundup of the 10 Best Online Survey Apps in 2020 and craft a concise survey geared to deliver insights into customers’ wishes.
2) Put your company’s whole heart into affinity
If I could gift every local business owner with a mantra to carry them through not just the 2020 holiday shopping season, but into 2021, it would be this:
It’s not enough to have customers discover my brand — I need them to like my brand.
Chances are, you can call to mind some brands of which you’re highly aware but would never shop with because they don’t meet your personal or business standards in some way. You’ve discovered these brands, but you don’t like them. In 2020, you may even have silently or overtly boycotted them.
On the opposite side of this scenario are the local brands you love. I can wax poetic about my local independent grocery store, stocking its shelves with sustainable products from local farmers, flying its Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ flags with pride from its storefront, and treating every customer like a cherished neighbor.
For many years, our SEO industry has put great effort into and emphasis on the discovery phase of the consumer journey, but my little country-town grocer has gone leaps and bounds beyond this by demonstrating affinity with the things my household cares about. The owners can consider us lifetime loyal customers for the ways they are going above-and-beyond in terms of empathy, diversity, and care for our community.
I vigorously encourage your business to put customer-brand affinity at the heart of its holiday strategy. Brainstorm how you can make meaningful changes that declare your company’s commitment to being part of the work of positive social change.
3) Be as accessible and communicative as possible
Once you’ve accomplished the above two goals, open the lines of communication about what your brand offers and the people-friendly aspects of how you operate across as many of the following as possible:
Website
Local business listings
Email
Social channels
Forms
Texts/Messaging
Phone on-hold marketing
Storefront and in-store signage
Local news, radio, and TV media
In my 17 years as a local SEO, I can confidently say that local business listings have never been a greater potential asset than they will be this holiday season. Google My Business listings, in particular, are an interface that can answer almost any customer who-what-where-when-why — if your business is managing these properly, whether manually or via software like Moz Local.
Anywhere a customer might be looking for what you offer, be there with accurate and abundant information about identity, location, hours of operation, policies, culture, and offerings. From setting special hours for each of your locations, to embracing Google Posts to microblog holiday content, to ensuring your website and social profiles are publicizing your USP, make your biggest communications effort ever this year.
At the same time, be sure you’re meeting Google’s mobile-friendly standards, and that your website is ADA-compliant so that no customer is left out. Provide a fast, intuitive, and inclusive experience to keep customers engaged.
With the pandemic necessitating social distancing, make the Internet your workhorse for connecting up with and provisioning your community as much as you can.
4) Embrace local e-commerce and product listings
Digital Commerce 360 has done a good job charting the 30%+ rise in online sales in the first half or 2020, largely resulting from the pandemic. The same publication summarizes the collective 19% leap in traffic to North America’s largest retailers. At the local business level, implementing even basic e-commerce function in advance of the holiday season could make a major difference, if you can find the most-desired methods of delivery. These could include:
Buy-online, pick up in-store (BOPIS)
Buy-online, pick up curbside
Buy online for postal delivery
Buy online for direct home delivery by in-house or third-party drivers
Here’s an extensive comparison of popular e-commerce solutions, including which ones have free trials, and the e-commerce column of the Moz blog is a free library of expert advice on optimizing digital sales.
Put your products everywhere you can. Don’t forget that this past April, Google surprised everybody by offering free product listings, and that they also recently acquired the Pointy device, which lets you transform scanned barcodes into online inventory pages.
Additionally, in mid-September, Google took their next big product-related step by adding a “nearby” filter to Google Shopping, taking us closer and closer to the search engine becoming a source for real-time local inventory, as I’ve been predicting here in my column for several years.
Implement the public safety protocols that review research from GatherUp shows consumers are demanding, get your inventory onto the web, identify the most convenient ways to get purchases from your storefront into the customer’s hands, and your efforts could pave the way for increased Q4 profits.
5) Reinvent window shopping with QR codes
“How can I do what I want to do?” asked Jennifer Bolin, owner of Clover Toys in Seattle.
What she wanted to do was use her storefront window to sell merchandise to patrons who were no longer able to walk into her store. When a staff member mentioned that you could use a QR code generator like this one to load inventory onto pedestrians’ cell phones, she decided to give it a try.
Just a generation or two ago, many Americans cherished the tradition of going to town or heading downtown to enjoy the lavish holiday window displays crafted by local retailers. The mercantile goal of this form of entertainment was to entice passersby indoors for a shopping spree. It’s time to bring this back in 2020, with the twist of labeling products with QR codes and pairing them with desirable methods of delivery, whether through a drive-up window, curbside, or delivery.
“We’ve even gotten late night sales,” Bolin told me when I spoke with her after my colleague Rob Ousbey pointed out this charming and smart independent retail shop to me.
If your business locations are in good areas for foot traffic, think of how a 24/7 asset like an actionable, goodie-packed window display could boost your sales.
6) Tie in with DIY, and consider kits
With so many customers housebound, anything your business can do to support activities and deliver supplies for domestic merrymaking is worth considering. Can your business tie in with decorating, baking, cooking, crafting, handmade gift-giving, home entertainment, or related themes? If so, create video tutorials, blog posts, GMB posts, social media tips, or other content to engage a local audience.
One complaint I am encountering frequently is that shoppers are feeling tired trying to piecemeal together components from the internet for something they want to make or do. Unsurprisingly, many people are longing for the days when they could leisurely browse local businesses in-person, taking inspiration from their hands-on interaction with merchandise. I think kits could offer a stopgap solution in some cases. If relevant to your business, consider bundling items that could provide everything a household needs to:
Prepare a special holiday meal
Bake treats
Outfit a yard for winter play
Trim a tree or decorate a home
Build a fire
Create a night of fun for children of various age groups
Dress appropriately for warmth and safety, based on region
Create a handmade gift, craft, or garment
Winter prep a home or vehicle
Create a complete home spa/health/beauty experience
Plant a spring garden
Kits could be a welcome all-in-one resource for many shoppers. Determine whether your brand has the components to offer one.
7) Manage reviews meticulously
Free, near-real-time quality control data from your holiday efforts can most easily be found in your review profiles. Use software like Moz Local to keep a running tally of your incoming new reviews, or assign a staff member at each location of your business to monitor your local business profiles daily for any complaints or questions.
If you can quickly solve problems people cite in their reviews, your chances are good of retaining the customer and demonstrating responsiveness to all your profiles’ visitors. You may even find that reviews turn up additional, unmet local needs your formal survey missed. Acting quickly to fulfill these requests could win you additional business in Q4 and beyond.
8) Highly publicize one extra reason to shop local this year
“72% of respondents...are likely or very likely to continue to shop at independent stores, either locally or online, above larger retailers such as Amazon.” — Bazaarvoice
I highly recommend reading the entire survey of 12,000 global respondents by Bazaarvoice, quantifying how substantially shopping behaviors have changed in 2020. It’s very good news for local business owners that so many customers want to keep transacting with nearby independents, but the Amazon dilemma remains.
Above, we discussed the fatigue that can result from trying to cobble together a bunch of different resources to check everything off a shopping list. This can drive people to online “everything stores”, in the same way that department stores, supermarkets, and malls have historically drawn in shoppers with the promise of convenience.
A question every local brand should do their best to ask and answer in the runup to the holidays is: What’s to prevent my community from simply taking their whole holiday shopping list to Amazon, or Walmart, or Target this year?
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
My completely personal answer to this question is that I want my town’s local business district, with its local flavor and diversity of shops, to still be there after a vaccine is hopefully developed for COVID-19. But that’s just me. Inspiring your customers’ allegiance to keeping your business going might be best supported by publicizing some of the following:
The economic, societal, and mental health benefits proven to stem from the presence of small, local businesses in a community.
Your philanthropic tie-ins, such as generating a percentage of sales to worthy local causes — there are so many ways to contribute this year.
The historic role your business has played in making your community a good place to live, particularly if your brand is an older, well-established one. I hear nostalgia is a strong influencer in 2020, and old images of your community and company through the years could be engaging content.
Any recent improvements you’ve made to ensure fast home delivery, whether by postal mail or via local drivers who can get gifts right to people’s doors.
Uplifting content that simply makes the day a bit brighter for a shopper. We’re all looking for a little extra support these days to keep our spirits bright.
Be intentional about maximizing local publicity of your “extra reason” to shop with you. Your local newspaper is doubtless running a stream of commentary about the economic picture in your city, and if your special efforts are newsworthy, a few mentions could do you a lot of good.
Don’t underestimate just how reliant people have become on the recommendations of friends, family, and online platforms for sourcing even the basics of life these days. In my own circle, everyone is now regularly telling everyone else where to find items from hand sanitizer to decent potatoes. Networking will be happening around gifts, too, so anything you get noticed for could support extensive word-of-mouth information sharing.
I want to close by thanking you for being in or marketing businesses that will help us all celebrate the many upcoming holidays in our own ways. Your efforts are appreciated, and I’m wishing you a peaceful, profitable, and hyggelig finish to 2020.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking
0 notes
bfxenon · 4 years
Text
My 8 Best Local SEO Tips for the 2020 Holidays
Posted by MiriamEllis

Image credit: DoSchu
“No place like home for the holidays.” This will be the refrain for the majority of your customers as we reach 2020’s peak shopping season. I can’t think of another year in which it’s been more important for local businesses to plan and implement a seasonal marketing strategy extra early, to connect up with customers who will be traveling less and seeking ways to celebrate at home.
Recently, it’s become trendy in multiple countries to try to capture the old Danish spirit of hygge, which the OED defines as: A quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.
While this sometimes-elusive state of being isn’t something you can buy direct from a store, and while some shoppers are still unfamiliar with hygge by name, many will be trying to create it at home this year. Denmark buys more candles than any other nation, and across Scandinavia, fondness for flowers, warming foods, cozy drinks, and time with loved ones characterizes the work of weaving a gentle web of happiness into even the darkest of winters.
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
1) Survey customers now and provide what they want
Reasonably-priced survey software is worth every penny in 2020. For as little as $20/month, your local business can understand exactly how much your customers’ needs have changed this past year by surveying:
Which products locals are having trouble locating
Which products/services they most want for the holidays
Which method of shopping/delivery would be most convenient for them
Which hours of operation would be most helpful
Which safety measures are must-haves for them to transact with a business
Which payment methods are current top choices
Doubtless, you can think of many questions like these to help you glean the most possible insight into local needs. Poll your customer email/text database and keep your surveys on the short side to avoid abandonment.
Don’t have the necessary tools to poll people at-the-ready? Check out Zapier’s roundup of the 10 Best Online Survey Apps in 2020 and craft a concise survey geared to deliver insights into customers’ wishes.
2) Put your company’s whole heart into affinity
If I could gift every local business owner with a mantra to carry them through not just the 2020 holiday shopping season, but into 2021, it would be this:
It’s not enough to have customers discover my brand — I need them to like my brand.
Chances are, you can call to mind some brands of which you’re highly aware but would never shop with because they don’t meet your personal or business standards in some way. You’ve discovered these brands, but you don’t like them. In 2020, you may even have silently or overtly boycotted them.
On the opposite side of this scenario are the local brands you love. I can wax poetic about my local independent grocery store, stocking its shelves with sustainable products from local farmers, flying its Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ flags with pride from its storefront, and treating every customer like a cherished neighbor.
For many years, our SEO industry has put great effort into and emphasis on the discovery phase of the consumer journey, but my little country-town grocer has gone leaps and bounds beyond this by demonstrating affinity with the things my household cares about. The owners can consider us lifetime loyal customers for the ways they are going above-and-beyond in terms of empathy, diversity, and care for our community.
I vigorously encourage your business to put customer-brand affinity at the heart of its holiday strategy. Brainstorm how you can make meaningful changes that declare your company’s commitment to being part of the work of positive social change.
3) Be as accessible and communicative as possible
Once you’ve accomplished the above two goals, open the lines of communication about what your brand offers and the people-friendly aspects of how you operate across as many of the following as possible:
Website
Local business listings
Email
Social channels
Forms
Texts/Messaging
Phone on-hold marketing
Storefront and in-store signage
Local news, radio, and TV media
In my 17 years as a local SEO, I can confidently say that local business listings have never been a greater potential asset than they will be this holiday season. Google My Business listings, in particular, are an interface that can answer almost any customer who-what-where-when-why — if your business is managing these properly, whether manually or via software like Moz Local.
Anywhere a customer might be looking for what you offer, be there with accurate and abundant information about identity, location, hours of operation, policies, culture, and offerings. From setting special hours for each of your locations, to embracing Google Posts to microblog holiday content, to ensuring your website and social profiles are publicizing your USP, make your biggest communications effort ever this year.
At the same time, be sure you’re meeting Google’s mobile-friendly standards, and that your website is ADA-compliant so that no customer is left out. Provide a fast, intuitive, and inclusive experience to keep customers engaged.
With the pandemic necessitating social distancing, make the Internet your workhorse for connecting up with and provisioning your community as much as you can.
4) Embrace local e-commerce and product listings
Digital Commerce 360 has done a good job charting the 30%+ rise in online sales in the first half or 2020, largely resulting from the pandemic. The same publication summarizes the collective 19% leap in traffic to North America’s largest retailers. At the local business level, implementing even basic e-commerce function in advance of the holiday season could make a major difference, if you can find the most-desired methods of delivery. These could include:
Buy-online, pick up in-store (BOPIS)
Buy-online, pick up curbside
Buy online for postal delivery
Buy online for direct home delivery by in-house or third-party drivers
Here’s an extensive comparison of popular e-commerce solutions, including which ones have free trials, and the e-commerce column of the Moz blog is a free library of expert advice on optimizing digital sales.
Put your products everywhere you can. Don’t forget that this past April, Google surprised everybody by offering free product listings, and that they also recently acquired the Pointy device, which lets you transform scanned barcodes into online inventory pages.
Additionally, in mid-September, Google took their next big product-related step by adding a “nearby” filter to Google Shopping, taking us closer and closer to the search engine becoming a source for real-time local inventory, as I’ve been predicting here in my column for several years.
Implement the public safety protocols that review research from GatherUp shows consumers are demanding, get your inventory onto the web, identify the most convenient ways to get purchases from your storefront into the customer’s hands, and your efforts could pave the way for increased Q4 profits.
5) Reinvent window shopping with QR codes
“How can I do what I want to do?” asked Jennifer Bolin, owner of Clover Toys in Seattle.
What she wanted to do was use her storefront window to sell merchandise to patrons who were no longer able to walk into her store. When a staff member mentioned that you could use a QR code generator like this one to load inventory onto pedestrians’ cell phones, she decided to give it a try.
Just a generation or two ago, many Americans cherished the tradition of going to town or heading downtown to enjoy the lavish holiday window displays crafted by local retailers. The mercantile goal of this form of entertainment was to entice passersby indoors for a shopping spree. It’s time to bring this back in 2020, with the twist of labeling products with QR codes and pairing them with desirable methods of delivery, whether through a drive-up window, curbside, or delivery.
“We’ve even gotten late night sales,” Bolin told me when I spoke with her after my colleague Rob Ousbey pointed out this charming and smart independent retail shop to me.
If your business locations are in good areas for foot traffic, think of how a 24/7 asset like an actionable, goodie-packed window display could boost your sales.
6) Tie in with DIY, and consider kits
With so many customers housebound, anything your business can do to support activities and deliver supplies for domestic merrymaking is worth considering. Can your business tie in with decorating, baking, cooking, crafting, handmade gift-giving, home entertainment, or related themes? If so, create video tutorials, blog posts, GMB posts, social media tips, or other content to engage a local audience.
One complaint I am encountering frequently is that shoppers are feeling tired trying to piecemeal together components from the internet for something they want to make or do. Unsurprisingly, many people are longing for the days when they could leisurely browse local businesses in-person, taking inspiration from their hands-on interaction with merchandise. I think kits could offer a stopgap solution in some cases. If relevant to your business, consider bundling items that could provide everything a household needs to:
Prepare a special holiday meal
Bake treats
Outfit a yard for winter play
Trim a tree or decorate a home
Build a fire
Create a night of fun for children of various age groups
Dress appropriately for warmth and safety, based on region
Create a handmade gift, craft, or garment
Winter prep a home or vehicle
Create a complete home spa/health/beauty experience
Plant a spring garden
Kits could be a welcome all-in-one resource for many shoppers. Determine whether your brand has the components to offer one.
7) Manage reviews meticulously
Free, near-real-time quality control data from your holiday efforts can most easily be found in your review profiles. Use software like Moz Local to keep a running tally of your incoming new reviews, or assign a staff member at each location of your business to monitor your local business profiles daily for any complaints or questions.
If you can quickly solve problems people cite in their reviews, your chances are good of retaining the customer and demonstrating responsiveness to all your profiles’ visitors. You may even find that reviews turn up additional, unmet local needs your formal survey missed. Acting quickly to fulfill these requests could win you additional business in Q4 and beyond.
8) Highly publicize one extra reason to shop local this year
“72% of respondents...are likely or very likely to continue to shop at independent stores, either locally or online, above larger retailers such as Amazon.” — Bazaarvoice
I highly recommend reading the entire survey of 12,000 global respondents by Bazaarvoice, quantifying how substantially shopping behaviors have changed in 2020. It’s very good news for local business owners that so many customers want to keep transacting with nearby independents, but the Amazon dilemma remains.
Above, we discussed the fatigue that can result from trying to cobble together a bunch of different resources to check everything off a shopping list. This can drive people to online “everything stores”, in the same way that department stores, supermarkets, and malls have historically drawn in shoppers with the promise of convenience.
A question every local brand should do their best to ask and answer in the runup to the holidays is: What’s to prevent my community from simply taking their whole holiday shopping list to Amazon, or Walmart, or Target this year?
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
My completely personal answer to this question is that I want my town’s local business district, with its local flavor and diversity of shops, to still be there after a vaccine is hopefully developed for COVID-19. But that’s just me. Inspiring your customers’ allegiance to keeping your business going might be best supported by publicizing some of the following:
The economic, societal, and mental health benefits proven to stem from the presence of small, local businesses in a community.
Your philanthropic tie-ins, such as generating a percentage of sales to worthy local causes — there are so many ways to contribute this year.
The historic role your business has played in making your community a good place to live, particularly if your brand is an older, well-established one. I hear nostalgia is a strong influencer in 2020, and old images of your community and company through the years could be engaging content.
Any recent improvements you’ve made to ensure fast home delivery, whether by postal mail or via local drivers who can get gifts right to people’s doors.
Uplifting content that simply makes the day a bit brighter for a shopper. We’re all looking for a little extra support these days to keep our spirits bright.
Be intentional about maximizing local publicity of your “extra reason” to shop with you. Your local newspaper is doubtless running a stream of commentary about the economic picture in your city, and if your special efforts are newsworthy, a few mentions could do you a lot of good.
Don’t underestimate just how reliant people have become on the recommendations of friends, family, and online platforms for sourcing even the basics of life these days. In my own circle, everyone is now regularly telling everyone else where to find items from hand sanitizer to decent potatoes. Networking will be happening around gifts, too, so anything you get noticed for could support extensive word-of-mouth information sharing.
I want to close by thanking you for being in or marketing businesses that will help us all celebrate the many upcoming holidays in our own ways. Your efforts are appreciated, and I’m wishing you a peaceful, profitable, and hyggelig finish to 2020.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
localwebmgmt · 4 years
Text
My 8 Best Local SEO Tips for the 2020 Holidays
Posted by MiriamEllis

Image credit: DoSchu
“No place like home for the holidays.” This will be the refrain for the majority of your customers as we reach 2020’s peak shopping season. I can’t think of another year in which it’s been more important for local businesses to plan and implement a seasonal marketing strategy extra early, to connect up with customers who will be traveling less and seeking ways to celebrate at home.
Recently, it’s become trendy in multiple countries to try to capture the old Danish spirit of hygge, which the OED defines as: A quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.
While this sometimes-elusive state of being isn’t something you can buy direct from a store, and while some shoppers are still unfamiliar with hygge by name, many will be trying to create it at home this year. Denmark buys more candles than any other nation, and across Scandinavia, fondness for flowers, warming foods, cozy drinks, and time with loved ones characterizes the work of weaving a gentle web of happiness into even the darkest of winters.
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
1) Survey customers now and provide what they want
Reasonably-priced survey software is worth every penny in 2020. For as little as $20/month, your local business can understand exactly how much your customers’ needs have changed this past year by surveying:
Which products locals are having trouble locating
Which products/services they most want for the holidays
Which method of shopping/delivery would be most convenient for them
Which hours of operation would be most helpful
Which safety measures are must-haves for them to transact with a business
Which payment methods are current top choices
Doubtless, you can think of many questions like these to help you glean the most possible insight into local needs. Poll your customer email/text database and keep your surveys on the short side to avoid abandonment.
Don’t have the necessary tools to poll people at-the-ready? Check out Zapier’s roundup of the 10 Best Online Survey Apps in 2020 and craft a concise survey geared to deliver insights into customers’ wishes.
2) Put your company’s whole heart into affinity
If I could gift every local business owner with a mantra to carry them through not just the 2020 holiday shopping season, but into 2021, it would be this:
It’s not enough to have customers discover my brand — I need them to like my brand.
Chances are, you can call to mind some brands of which you’re highly aware but would never shop with because they don’t meet your personal or business standards in some way. You’ve discovered these brands, but you don’t like them. In 2020, you may even have silently or overtly boycotted them.
On the opposite side of this scenario are the local brands you love. I can wax poetic about my local independent grocery store, stocking its shelves with sustainable products from local farmers, flying its Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ flags with pride from its storefront, and treating every customer like a cherished neighbor.
For many years, our SEO industry has put great effort into and emphasis on the discovery phase of the consumer journey, but my little country-town grocer has gone leaps and bounds beyond this by demonstrating affinity with the things my household cares about. The owners can consider us lifetime loyal customers for the ways they are going above-and-beyond in terms of empathy, diversity, and care for our community.
I vigorously encourage your business to put customer-brand affinity at the heart of its holiday strategy. Brainstorm how you can make meaningful changes that declare your company’s commitment to being part of the work of positive social change.
3) Be as accessible and communicative as possible
Once you’ve accomplished the above two goals, open the lines of communication about what your brand offers and the people-friendly aspects of how you operate across as many of the following as possible:
Website
Local business listings
Email
Social channels
Forms
Texts/Messaging
Phone on-hold marketing
Storefront and in-store signage
Local news, radio, and TV media
In my 17 years as a local SEO, I can confidently say that local business listings have never been a greater potential asset than they will be this holiday season. Google My Business listings, in particular, are an interface that can answer almost any customer who-what-where-when-why — if your business is managing these properly, whether manually or via software like Moz Local.
Anywhere a customer might be looking for what you offer, be there with accurate and abundant information about identity, location, hours of operation, policies, culture, and offerings. From setting special hours for each of your locations, to embracing Google Posts to microblog holiday content, to ensuring your website and social profiles are publicizing your USP, make your biggest communications effort ever this year.
At the same time, be sure you’re meeting Google’s mobile-friendly standards, and that your website is ADA-compliant so that no customer is left out. Provide a fast, intuitive, and inclusive experience to keep customers engaged.
With the pandemic necessitating social distancing, make the Internet your workhorse for connecting up with and provisioning your community as much as you can.
4) Embrace local e-commerce and product listings
Digital Commerce 360 has done a good job charting the 30%+ rise in online sales in the first half or 2020, largely resulting from the pandemic. The same publication summarizes the collective 19% leap in traffic to North America’s largest retailers. At the local business level, implementing even basic e-commerce function in advance of the holiday season could make a major difference, if you can find the most-desired methods of delivery. These could include:
Buy-online, pick up in-store (BOPIS)
Buy-online, pick up curbside
Buy online for postal delivery
Buy online for direct home delivery by in-house or third-party drivers
Here’s an extensive comparison of popular e-commerce solutions, including which ones have free trials, and the e-commerce column of the Moz blog is a free library of expert advice on optimizing digital sales.
Put your products everywhere you can. Don’t forget that this past April, Google surprised everybody by offering free product listings, and that they also recently acquired the Pointy device, which lets you transform scanned barcodes into online inventory pages.
Additionally, in mid-September, Google took their next big product-related step by adding a “nearby” filter to Google Shopping, taking us closer and closer to the search engine becoming a source for real-time local inventory, as I’ve been predicting here in my column for several years.
Implement the public safety protocols that review research from GatherUp shows consumers are demanding, get your inventory onto the web, identify the most convenient ways to get purchases from your storefront into the customer’s hands, and your efforts could pave the way for increased Q4 profits.
5) Reinvent window shopping with QR codes
“How can I do what I want to do?” asked Jennifer Bolin, owner of Clover Toys in Seattle.
What she wanted to do was use her storefront window to sell merchandise to patrons who were no longer able to walk into her store. When a staff member mentioned that you could use a QR code generator like this one to load inventory onto pedestrians’ cell phones, she decided to give it a try.
Just a generation or two ago, many Americans cherished the tradition of going to town or heading downtown to enjoy the lavish holiday window displays crafted by local retailers. The mercantile goal of this form of entertainment was to entice passersby indoors for a shopping spree. It’s time to bring this back in 2020, with the twist of labeling products with QR codes and pairing them with desirable methods of delivery, whether through a drive-up window, curbside, or delivery.
“We’ve even gotten late night sales,” Bolin told me when I spoke with her after my colleague Rob Ousbey pointed out this charming and smart independent retail shop to me.
If your business locations are in good areas for foot traffic, think of how a 24/7 asset like an actionable, goodie-packed window display could boost your sales.
6) Tie in with DIY, and consider kits
With so many customers housebound, anything your business can do to support activities and deliver supplies for domestic merrymaking is worth considering. Can your business tie in with decorating, baking, cooking, crafting, handmade gift-giving, home entertainment, or related themes? If so, create video tutorials, blog posts, GMB posts, social media tips, or other content to engage a local audience.
One complaint I am encountering frequently is that shoppers are feeling tired trying to piecemeal together components from the internet for something they want to make or do. Unsurprisingly, many people are longing for the days when they could leisurely browse local businesses in-person, taking inspiration from their hands-on interaction with merchandise. I think kits could offer a stopgap solution in some cases. If relevant to your business, consider bundling items that could provide everything a household needs to:
Prepare a special holiday meal
Bake treats
Outfit a yard for winter play
Trim a tree or decorate a home
Build a fire
Create a night of fun for children of various age groups
Dress appropriately for warmth and safety, based on region
Create a handmade gift, craft, or garment
Winter prep a home or vehicle
Create a complete home spa/health/beauty experience
Plant a spring garden
Kits could be a welcome all-in-one resource for many shoppers. Determine whether your brand has the components to offer one.
7) Manage reviews meticulously
Free, near-real-time quality control data from your holiday efforts can most easily be found in your review profiles. Use software like Moz Local to keep a running tally of your incoming new reviews, or assign a staff member at each location of your business to monitor your local business profiles daily for any complaints or questions.
If you can quickly solve problems people cite in their reviews, your chances are good of retaining the customer and demonstrating responsiveness to all your profiles’ visitors. You may even find that reviews turn up additional, unmet local needs your formal survey missed. Acting quickly to fulfill these requests could win you additional business in Q4 and beyond.
8) Highly publicize one extra reason to shop local this year
“72% of respondents...are likely or very likely to continue to shop at independent stores, either locally or online, above larger retailers such as Amazon.” — Bazaarvoice
I highly recommend reading the entire survey of 12,000 global respondents by Bazaarvoice, quantifying how substantially shopping behaviors have changed in 2020. It’s very good news for local business owners that so many customers want to keep transacting with nearby independents, but the Amazon dilemma remains.
Above, we discussed the fatigue that can result from trying to cobble together a bunch of different resources to check everything off a shopping list. This can drive people to online “everything stores”, in the same way that department stores, supermarkets, and malls have historically drawn in shoppers with the promise of convenience.
A question every local brand should do their best to ask and answer in the runup to the holidays is: What’s to prevent my community from simply taking their whole holiday shopping list to Amazon, or Walmart, or Target this year?
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
My completely personal answer to this question is that I want my town’s local business district, with its local flavor and diversity of shops, to still be there after a vaccine is hopefully developed for COVID-19. But that’s just me. Inspiring your customers’ allegiance to keeping your business going might be best supported by publicizing some of the following:
The economic, societal, and mental health benefits proven to stem from the presence of small, local businesses in a community.
Your philanthropic tie-ins, such as generating a percentage of sales to worthy local causes — there are so many ways to contribute this year.
The historic role your business has played in making your community a good place to live, particularly if your brand is an older, well-established one. I hear nostalgia is a strong influencer in 2020, and old images of your community and company through the years could be engaging content.
Any recent improvements you’ve made to ensure fast home delivery, whether by postal mail or via local drivers who can get gifts right to people’s doors.
Uplifting content that simply makes the day a bit brighter for a shopper. We’re all looking for a little extra support these days to keep our spirits bright.
Be intentional about maximizing local publicity of your “extra reason” to shop with you. Your local newspaper is doubtless running a stream of commentary about the economic picture in your city, and if your special efforts are newsworthy, a few mentions could do you a lot of good.
Don’t underestimate just how reliant people have become on the recommendations of friends, family, and online platforms for sourcing even the basics of life these days. In my own circle, everyone is now regularly telling everyone else where to find items from hand sanitizer to decent potatoes. Networking will be happening around gifts, too, so anything you get noticed for could support extensive word-of-mouth information sharing.
I want to close by thanking you for being in or marketing businesses that will help us all celebrate the many upcoming holidays in our own ways. Your efforts are appreciated, and I’m wishing you a peaceful, profitable, and hyggelig finish to 2020.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
nutrifami · 4 years
Text
My 8 Best Local SEO Tips for the 2020 Holidays
Posted by MiriamEllis

Image credit: DoSchu
“No place like home for the holidays.” This will be the refrain for the majority of your customers as we reach 2020’s peak shopping season. I can’t think of another year in which it’s been more important for local businesses to plan and implement a seasonal marketing strategy extra early, to connect up with customers who will be traveling less and seeking ways to celebrate at home.
Recently, it’s become trendy in multiple countries to try to capture the old Danish spirit of hygge, which the OED defines as: A quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.
While this sometimes-elusive state of being isn’t something you can buy direct from a store, and while some shoppers are still unfamiliar with hygge by name, many will be trying to create it at home this year. Denmark buys more candles than any other nation, and across Scandinavia, fondness for flowers, warming foods, cozy drinks, and time with loved ones characterizes the work of weaving a gentle web of happiness into even the darkest of winters.
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
1) Survey customers now and provide what they want
Reasonably-priced survey software is worth every penny in 2020. For as little as $20/month, your local business can understand exactly how much your customers’ needs have changed this past year by surveying:
Which products locals are having trouble locating
Which products/services they most want for the holidays
Which method of shopping/delivery would be most convenient for them
Which hours of operation would be most helpful
Which safety measures are must-haves for them to transact with a business
Which payment methods are current top choices
Doubtless, you can think of many questions like these to help you glean the most possible insight into local needs. Poll your customer email/text database and keep your surveys on the short side to avoid abandonment.
Don’t have the necessary tools to poll people at-the-ready? Check out Zapier’s roundup of the 10 Best Online Survey Apps in 2020 and craft a concise survey geared to deliver insights into customers’ wishes.
2) Put your company’s whole heart into affinity
If I could gift every local business owner with a mantra to carry them through not just the 2020 holiday shopping season, but into 2021, it would be this:
It’s not enough to have customers discover my brand — I need them to like my brand.
Chances are, you can call to mind some brands of which you’re highly aware but would never shop with because they don’t meet your personal or business standards in some way. You’ve discovered these brands, but you don’t like them. In 2020, you may even have silently or overtly boycotted them.
On the opposite side of this scenario are the local brands you love. I can wax poetic about my local independent grocery store, stocking its shelves with sustainable products from local farmers, flying its Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ flags with pride from its storefront, and treating every customer like a cherished neighbor.
For many years, our SEO industry has put great effort into and emphasis on the discovery phase of the consumer journey, but my little country-town grocer has gone leaps and bounds beyond this by demonstrating affinity with the things my household cares about. The owners can consider us lifetime loyal customers for the ways they are going above-and-beyond in terms of empathy, diversity, and care for our community.
I vigorously encourage your business to put customer-brand affinity at the heart of its holiday strategy. Brainstorm how you can make meaningful changes that declare your company’s commitment to being part of the work of positive social change.
3) Be as accessible and communicative as possible
Once you’ve accomplished the above two goals, open the lines of communication about what your brand offers and the people-friendly aspects of how you operate across as many of the following as possible:
Website
Local business listings
Email
Social channels
Forms
Texts/Messaging
Phone on-hold marketing
Storefront and in-store signage
Local news, radio, and TV media
In my 17 years as a local SEO, I can confidently say that local business listings have never been a greater potential asset than they will be this holiday season. Google My Business listings, in particular, are an interface that can answer almost any customer who-what-where-when-why — if your business is managing these properly, whether manually or via software like Moz Local.
Anywhere a customer might be looking for what you offer, be there with accurate and abundant information about identity, location, hours of operation, policies, culture, and offerings. From setting special hours for each of your locations, to embracing Google Posts to microblog holiday content, to ensuring your website and social profiles are publicizing your USP, make your biggest communications effort ever this year.
At the same time, be sure you’re meeting Google’s mobile-friendly standards, and that your website is ADA-compliant so that no customer is left out. Provide a fast, intuitive, and inclusive experience to keep customers engaged.
With the pandemic necessitating social distancing, make the Internet your workhorse for connecting up with and provisioning your community as much as you can.
4) Embrace local e-commerce and product listings
Digital Commerce 360 has done a good job charting the 30%+ rise in online sales in the first half or 2020, largely resulting from the pandemic. The same publication summarizes the collective 19% leap in traffic to North America’s largest retailers. At the local business level, implementing even basic e-commerce function in advance of the holiday season could make a major difference, if you can find the most-desired methods of delivery. These could include:
Buy-online, pick up in-store (BOPIS)
Buy-online, pick up curbside
Buy online for postal delivery
Buy online for direct home delivery by in-house or third-party drivers
Here’s an extensive comparison of popular e-commerce solutions, including which ones have free trials, and the e-commerce column of the Moz blog is a free library of expert advice on optimizing digital sales.
Put your products everywhere you can. Don’t forget that this past April, Google surprised everybody by offering free product listings, and that they also recently acquired the Pointy device, which lets you transform scanned barcodes into online inventory pages.
Additionally, in mid-September, Google took their next big product-related step by adding a “nearby” filter to Google Shopping, taking us closer and closer to the search engine becoming a source for real-time local inventory, as I’ve been predicting here in my column for several years.
Implement the public safety protocols that review research from GatherUp shows consumers are demanding, get your inventory onto the web, identify the most convenient ways to get purchases from your storefront into the customer’s hands, and your efforts could pave the way for increased Q4 profits.
5) Reinvent window shopping with QR codes
“How can I do what I want to do?” asked Jennifer Bolin, owner of Clover Toys in Seattle.
What she wanted to do was use her storefront window to sell merchandise to patrons who were no longer able to walk into her store. When a staff member mentioned that you could use a QR code generator like this one to load inventory onto pedestrians’ cell phones, she decided to give it a try.
Just a generation or two ago, many Americans cherished the tradition of going to town or heading downtown to enjoy the lavish holiday window displays crafted by local retailers. The mercantile goal of this form of entertainment was to entice passersby indoors for a shopping spree. It’s time to bring this back in 2020, with the twist of labeling products with QR codes and pairing them with desirable methods of delivery, whether through a drive-up window, curbside, or delivery.
“We’ve even gotten late night sales,” Bolin told me when I spoke with her after my colleague Rob Ousbey pointed out this charming and smart independent retail shop to me.
If your business locations are in good areas for foot traffic, think of how a 24/7 asset like an actionable, goodie-packed window display could boost your sales.
6) Tie in with DIY, and consider kits
With so many customers housebound, anything your business can do to support activities and deliver supplies for domestic merrymaking is worth considering. Can your business tie in with decorating, baking, cooking, crafting, handmade gift-giving, home entertainment, or related themes? If so, create video tutorials, blog posts, GMB posts, social media tips, or other content to engage a local audience.
One complaint I am encountering frequently is that shoppers are feeling tired trying to piecemeal together components from the internet for something they want to make or do. Unsurprisingly, many people are longing for the days when they could leisurely browse local businesses in-person, taking inspiration from their hands-on interaction with merchandise. I think kits could offer a stopgap solution in some cases. If relevant to your business, consider bundling items that could provide everything a household needs to:
Prepare a special holiday meal
Bake treats
Outfit a yard for winter play
Trim a tree or decorate a home
Build a fire
Create a night of fun for children of various age groups
Dress appropriately for warmth and safety, based on region
Create a handmade gift, craft, or garment
Winter prep a home or vehicle
Create a complete home spa/health/beauty experience
Plant a spring garden
Kits could be a welcome all-in-one resource for many shoppers. Determine whether your brand has the components to offer one.
7) Manage reviews meticulously
Free, near-real-time quality control data from your holiday efforts can most easily be found in your review profiles. Use software like Moz Local to keep a running tally of your incoming new reviews, or assign a staff member at each location of your business to monitor your local business profiles daily for any complaints or questions.
If you can quickly solve problems people cite in their reviews, your chances are good of retaining the customer and demonstrating responsiveness to all your profiles’ visitors. You may even find that reviews turn up additional, unmet local needs your formal survey missed. Acting quickly to fulfill these requests could win you additional business in Q4 and beyond.
8) Highly publicize one extra reason to shop local this year
“72% of respondents...are likely or very likely to continue to shop at independent stores, either locally or online, above larger retailers such as Amazon.” — Bazaarvoice
I highly recommend reading the entire survey of 12,000 global respondents by Bazaarvoice, quantifying how substantially shopping behaviors have changed in 2020. It’s very good news for local business owners that so many customers want to keep transacting with nearby independents, but the Amazon dilemma remains.
Above, we discussed the fatigue that can result from trying to cobble together a bunch of different resources to check everything off a shopping list. This can drive people to online “everything stores”, in the same way that department stores, supermarkets, and malls have historically drawn in shoppers with the promise of convenience.
A question every local brand should do their best to ask and answer in the runup to the holidays is: What’s to prevent my community from simply taking their whole holiday shopping list to Amazon, or Walmart, or Target this year?
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
My completely personal answer to this question is that I want my town’s local business district, with its local flavor and diversity of shops, to still be there after a vaccine is hopefully developed for COVID-19. But that’s just me. Inspiring your customers’ allegiance to keeping your business going might be best supported by publicizing some of the following:
The economic, societal, and mental health benefits proven to stem from the presence of small, local businesses in a community.
Your philanthropic tie-ins, such as generating a percentage of sales to worthy local causes — there are so many ways to contribute this year.
The historic role your business has played in making your community a good place to live, particularly if your brand is an older, well-established one. I hear nostalgia is a strong influencer in 2020, and old images of your community and company through the years could be engaging content.
Any recent improvements you’ve made to ensure fast home delivery, whether by postal mail or via local drivers who can get gifts right to people’s doors.
Uplifting content that simply makes the day a bit brighter for a shopper. We’re all looking for a little extra support these days to keep our spirits bright.
Be intentional about maximizing local publicity of your “extra reason” to shop with you. Your local newspaper is doubtless running a stream of commentary about the economic picture in your city, and if your special efforts are newsworthy, a few mentions could do you a lot of good.
Don’t underestimate just how reliant people have become on the recommendations of friends, family, and online platforms for sourcing even the basics of life these days. In my own circle, everyone is now regularly telling everyone else where to find items from hand sanitizer to decent potatoes. Networking will be happening around gifts, too, so anything you get noticed for could support extensive word-of-mouth information sharing.
I want to close by thanking you for being in or marketing businesses that will help us all celebrate the many upcoming holidays in our own ways. Your efforts are appreciated, and I’m wishing you a peaceful, profitable, and hyggelig finish to 2020.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
daynamartinez22 · 4 years
Text
My 8 Best Local SEO Tips for the 2020 Holidays
Posted by MiriamEllis

Image credit: DoSchu
“No place like home for the holidays.” This will be the refrain for the majority of your customers as we reach 2020’s peak shopping season. I can’t think of another year in which it’s been more important for local businesses to plan and implement a seasonal marketing strategy extra early, to connect up with customers who will be traveling less and seeking ways to celebrate at home.
Recently, it’s become trendy in multiple countries to try to capture the old Danish spirit of hygge, which the OED defines as: A quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.
While this sometimes-elusive state of being isn’t something you can buy direct from a store, and while some shoppers are still unfamiliar with hygge by name, many will be trying to create it at home this year. Denmark buys more candles than any other nation, and across Scandinavia, fondness for flowers, warming foods, cozy drinks, and time with loved ones characterizes the work of weaving a gentle web of happiness into even the darkest of winters.
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
1) Survey customers now and provide what they want
Reasonably-priced survey software is worth every penny in 2020. For as little as $20/month, your local business can understand exactly how much your customers’ needs have changed this past year by surveying:
Which products locals are having trouble locating
Which products/services they most want for the holidays
Which method of shopping/delivery would be most convenient for them
Which hours of operation would be most helpful
Which safety measures are must-haves for them to transact with a business
Which payment methods are current top choices
Doubtless, you can think of many questions like these to help you glean the most possible insight into local needs. Poll your customer email/text database and keep your surveys on the short side to avoid abandonment.
Don’t have the necessary tools to poll people at-the-ready? Check out Zapier’s roundup of the 10 Best Online Survey Apps in 2020 and craft a concise survey geared to deliver insights into customers’ wishes.
2) Put your company’s whole heart into affinity
If I could gift every local business owner with a mantra to carry them through not just the 2020 holiday shopping season, but into 2021, it would be this:
It’s not enough to have customers discover my brand — I need them to like my brand.
Chances are, you can call to mind some brands of which you’re highly aware but would never shop with because they don’t meet your personal or business standards in some way. You’ve discovered these brands, but you don’t like them. In 2020, you may even have silently or overtly boycotted them.
On the opposite side of this scenario are the local brands you love. I can wax poetic about my local independent grocery store, stocking its shelves with sustainable products from local farmers, flying its Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ flags with pride from its storefront, and treating every customer like a cherished neighbor.
For many years, our SEO industry has put great effort into and emphasis on the discovery phase of the consumer journey, but my little country-town grocer has gone leaps and bounds beyond this by demonstrating affinity with the things my household cares about. The owners can consider us lifetime loyal customers for the ways they are going above-and-beyond in terms of empathy, diversity, and care for our community.
I vigorously encourage your business to put customer-brand affinity at the heart of its holiday strategy. Brainstorm how you can make meaningful changes that declare your company’s commitment to being part of the work of positive social change.
3) Be as accessible and communicative as possible
Once you’ve accomplished the above two goals, open the lines of communication about what your brand offers and the people-friendly aspects of how you operate across as many of the following as possible:
Website
Local business listings
Email
Social channels
Forms
Texts/Messaging
Phone on-hold marketing
Storefront and in-store signage
Local news, radio, and TV media
In my 17 years as a local SEO, I can confidently say that local business listings have never been a greater potential asset than they will be this holiday season. Google My Business listings, in particular, are an interface that can answer almost any customer who-what-where-when-why — if your business is managing these properly, whether manually or via software like Moz Local.
Anywhere a customer might be looking for what you offer, be there with accurate and abundant information about identity, location, hours of operation, policies, culture, and offerings. From setting special hours for each of your locations, to embracing Google Posts to microblog holiday content, to ensuring your website and social profiles are publicizing your USP, make your biggest communications effort ever this year.
At the same time, be sure you’re meeting Google’s mobile-friendly standards, and that your website is ADA-compliant so that no customer is left out. Provide a fast, intuitive, and inclusive experience to keep customers engaged.
With the pandemic necessitating social distancing, make the Internet your workhorse for connecting up with and provisioning your community as much as you can.
4) Embrace local e-commerce and product listings
Digital Commerce 360 has done a good job charting the 30%+ rise in online sales in the first half or 2020, largely resulting from the pandemic. The same publication summarizes the collective 19% leap in traffic to North America’s largest retailers. At the local business level, implementing even basic e-commerce function in advance of the holiday season could make a major difference, if you can find the most-desired methods of delivery. These could include:
Buy-online, pick up in-store (BOPIS)
Buy-online, pick up curbside
Buy online for postal delivery
Buy online for direct home delivery by in-house or third-party drivers
Here’s an extensive comparison of popular e-commerce solutions, including which ones have free trials, and the e-commerce column of the Moz blog is a free library of expert advice on optimizing digital sales.
Put your products everywhere you can. Don’t forget that this past April, Google surprised everybody by offering free product listings, and that they also recently acquired the Pointy device, which lets you transform scanned barcodes into online inventory pages.
Additionally, in mid-September, Google took their next big product-related step by adding a “nearby” filter to Google Shopping, taking us closer and closer to the search engine becoming a source for real-time local inventory, as I’ve been predicting here in my column for several years.
Implement the public safety protocols that review research from GatherUp shows consumers are demanding, get your inventory onto the web, identify the most convenient ways to get purchases from your storefront into the customer’s hands, and your efforts could pave the way for increased Q4 profits.
5) Reinvent window shopping with QR codes
“How can I do what I want to do?” asked Jennifer Bolin, owner of Clover Toys in Seattle.
What she wanted to do was use her storefront window to sell merchandise to patrons who were no longer able to walk into her store. When a staff member mentioned that you could use a QR code generator like this one to load inventory onto pedestrians’ cell phones, she decided to give it a try.
Just a generation or two ago, many Americans cherished the tradition of going to town or heading downtown to enjoy the lavish holiday window displays crafted by local retailers. The mercantile goal of this form of entertainment was to entice passersby indoors for a shopping spree. It’s time to bring this back in 2020, with the twist of labeling products with QR codes and pairing them with desirable methods of delivery, whether through a drive-up window, curbside, or delivery.
“We’ve even gotten late night sales,” Bolin told me when I spoke with her after my colleague Rob Ousbey pointed out this charming and smart independent retail shop to me.
If your business locations are in good areas for foot traffic, think of how a 24/7 asset like an actionable, goodie-packed window display could boost your sales.
6) Tie in with DIY, and consider kits
With so many customers housebound, anything your business can do to support activities and deliver supplies for domestic merrymaking is worth considering. Can your business tie in with decorating, baking, cooking, crafting, handmade gift-giving, home entertainment, or related themes? If so, create video tutorials, blog posts, GMB posts, social media tips, or other content to engage a local audience.
One complaint I am encountering frequently is that shoppers are feeling tired trying to piecemeal together components from the internet for something they want to make or do. Unsurprisingly, many people are longing for the days when they could leisurely browse local businesses in-person, taking inspiration from their hands-on interaction with merchandise. I think kits could offer a stopgap solution in some cases. If relevant to your business, consider bundling items that could provide everything a household needs to:
Prepare a special holiday meal
Bake treats
Outfit a yard for winter play
Trim a tree or decorate a home
Build a fire
Create a night of fun for children of various age groups
Dress appropriately for warmth and safety, based on region
Create a handmade gift, craft, or garment
Winter prep a home or vehicle
Create a complete home spa/health/beauty experience
Plant a spring garden
Kits could be a welcome all-in-one resource for many shoppers. Determine whether your brand has the components to offer one.
7) Manage reviews meticulously
Free, near-real-time quality control data from your holiday efforts can most easily be found in your review profiles. Use software like Moz Local to keep a running tally of your incoming new reviews, or assign a staff member at each location of your business to monitor your local business profiles daily for any complaints or questions.
If you can quickly solve problems people cite in their reviews, your chances are good of retaining the customer and demonstrating responsiveness to all your profiles’ visitors. You may even find that reviews turn up additional, unmet local needs your formal survey missed. Acting quickly to fulfill these requests could win you additional business in Q4 and beyond.
8) Highly publicize one extra reason to shop local this year
“72% of respondents...are likely or very likely to continue to shop at independent stores, either locally or online, above larger retailers such as Amazon.” — Bazaarvoice
I highly recommend reading the entire survey of 12,000 global respondents by Bazaarvoice, quantifying how substantially shopping behaviors have changed in 2020. It’s very good news for local business owners that so many customers want to keep transacting with nearby independents, but the Amazon dilemma remains.
Above, we discussed the fatigue that can result from trying to cobble together a bunch of different resources to check everything off a shopping list. This can drive people to online “everything stores”, in the same way that department stores, supermarkets, and malls have historically drawn in shoppers with the promise of convenience.
A question every local brand should do their best to ask and answer in the runup to the holidays is: What’s to prevent my community from simply taking their whole holiday shopping list to Amazon, or Walmart, or Target this year?
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
My completely personal answer to this question is that I want my town’s local business district, with its local flavor and diversity of shops, to still be there after a vaccine is hopefully developed for COVID-19. But that’s just me. Inspiring your customers’ allegiance to keeping your business going might be best supported by publicizing some of the following:
The economic, societal, and mental health benefits proven to stem from the presence of small, local businesses in a community.
Your philanthropic tie-ins, such as generating a percentage of sales to worthy local causes — there are so many ways to contribute this year.
The historic role your business has played in making your community a good place to live, particularly if your brand is an older, well-established one. I hear nostalgia is a strong influencer in 2020, and old images of your community and company through the years could be engaging content.
Any recent improvements you’ve made to ensure fast home delivery, whether by postal mail or via local drivers who can get gifts right to people’s doors.
Uplifting content that simply makes the day a bit brighter for a shopper. We’re all looking for a little extra support these days to keep our spirits bright.
Be intentional about maximizing local publicity of your “extra reason” to shop with you. Your local newspaper is doubtless running a stream of commentary about the economic picture in your city, and if your special efforts are newsworthy, a few mentions could do you a lot of good.
Don’t underestimate just how reliant people have become on the recommendations of friends, family, and online platforms for sourcing even the basics of life these days. In my own circle, everyone is now regularly telling everyone else where to find items from hand sanitizer to decent potatoes. Networking will be happening around gifts, too, so anything you get noticed for could support extensive word-of-mouth information sharing.
I want to close by thanking you for being in or marketing businesses that will help us all celebrate the many upcoming holidays in our own ways. Your efforts are appreciated, and I’m wishing you a peaceful, profitable, and hyggelig finish to 2020.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
xaydungtruonggia · 4 years
Text
My 8 Best Local SEO Tips for the 2020 Holidays
Posted by MiriamEllis

Image credit: DoSchu
“No place like home for the holidays.” This will be the refrain for the majority of your customers as we reach 2020’s peak shopping season. I can’t think of another year in which it’s been more important for local businesses to plan and implement a seasonal marketing strategy extra early, to connect up with customers who will be traveling less and seeking ways to celebrate at home.
Recently, it’s become trendy in multiple countries to try to capture the old Danish spirit of hygge, which the OED defines as: A quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.
While this sometimes-elusive state of being isn’t something you can buy direct from a store, and while some shoppers are still unfamiliar with hygge by name, many will be trying to create it at home this year. Denmark buys more candles than any other nation, and across Scandinavia, fondness for flowers, warming foods, cozy drinks, and time with loved ones characterizes the work of weaving a gentle web of happiness into even the darkest of winters.
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
1) Survey customers now and provide what they want
Reasonably-priced survey software is worth every penny in 2020. For as little as $20/month, your local business can understand exactly how much your customers’ needs have changed this past year by surveying:
Which products locals are having trouble locating
Which products/services they most want for the holidays
Which method of shopping/delivery would be most convenient for them
Which hours of operation would be most helpful
Which safety measures are must-haves for them to transact with a business
Which payment methods are current top choices
Doubtless, you can think of many questions like these to help you glean the most possible insight into local needs. Poll your customer email/text database and keep your surveys on the short side to avoid abandonment.
Don’t have the necessary tools to poll people at-the-ready? Check out Zapier’s roundup of the 10 Best Online Survey Apps in 2020 and craft a concise survey geared to deliver insights into customers’ wishes.
2) Put your company’s whole heart into affinity
If I could gift every local business owner with a mantra to carry them through not just the 2020 holiday shopping season, but into 2021, it would be this:
It’s not enough to have customers discover my brand — I need them to like my brand.
Chances are, you can call to mind some brands of which you’re highly aware but would never shop with because they don’t meet your personal or business standards in some way. You’ve discovered these brands, but you don’t like them. In 2020, you may even have silently or overtly boycotted them.
On the opposite side of this scenario are the local brands you love. I can wax poetic about my local independent grocery store, stocking its shelves with sustainable products from local farmers, flying its Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ flags with pride from its storefront, and treating every customer like a cherished neighbor.
For many years, our SEO industry has put great effort into and emphasis on the discovery phase of the consumer journey, but my little country-town grocer has gone leaps and bounds beyond this by demonstrating affinity with the things my household cares about. The owners can consider us lifetime loyal customers for the ways they are going above-and-beyond in terms of empathy, diversity, and care for our community.
I vigorously encourage your business to put customer-brand affinity at the heart of its holiday strategy. Brainstorm how you can make meaningful changes that declare your company’s commitment to being part of the work of positive social change.
3) Be as accessible and communicative as possible
Once you’ve accomplished the above two goals, open the lines of communication about what your brand offers and the people-friendly aspects of how you operate across as many of the following as possible:
Website
Local business listings
Email
Social channels
Forms
Texts/Messaging
Phone on-hold marketing
Storefront and in-store signage
Local news, radio, and TV media
In my 17 years as a local SEO, I can confidently say that local business listings have never been a greater potential asset than they will be this holiday season. Google My Business listings, in particular, are an interface that can answer almost any customer who-what-where-when-why — if your business is managing these properly, whether manually or via software like Moz Local.
Anywhere a customer might be looking for what you offer, be there with accurate and abundant information about identity, location, hours of operation, policies, culture, and offerings. From setting special hours for each of your locations, to embracing Google Posts to microblog holiday content, to ensuring your website and social profiles are publicizing your USP, make your biggest communications effort ever this year.
At the same time, be sure you’re meeting Google’s mobile-friendly standards, and that your website is ADA-compliant so that no customer is left out. Provide a fast, intuitive, and inclusive experience to keep customers engaged.
With the pandemic necessitating social distancing, make the Internet your workhorse for connecting up with and provisioning your community as much as you can.
4) Embrace local e-commerce and product listings
Digital Commerce 360 has done a good job charting the 30%+ rise in online sales in the first half or 2020, largely resulting from the pandemic. The same publication summarizes the collective 19% leap in traffic to North America’s largest retailers. At the local business level, implementing even basic e-commerce function in advance of the holiday season could make a major difference, if you can find the most-desired methods of delivery. These could include:
Buy-online, pick up in-store (BOPIS)
Buy-online, pick up curbside
Buy online for postal delivery
Buy online for direct home delivery by in-house or third-party drivers
Here’s an extensive comparison of popular e-commerce solutions, including which ones have free trials, and the e-commerce column of the Moz blog is a free library of expert advice on optimizing digital sales.
Put your products everywhere you can. Don’t forget that this past April, Google surprised everybody by offering free product listings, and that they also recently acquired the Pointy device, which lets you transform scanned barcodes into online inventory pages.
Additionally, in mid-September, Google took their next big product-related step by adding a “nearby” filter to Google Shopping, taking us closer and closer to the search engine becoming a source for real-time local inventory, as I’ve been predicting here in my column for several years.
Implement the public safety protocols that review research from GatherUp shows consumers are demanding, get your inventory onto the web, identify the most convenient ways to get purchases from your storefront into the customer’s hands, and your efforts could pave the way for increased Q4 profits.
5) Reinvent window shopping with QR codes
“How can I do what I want to do?” asked Jennifer Bolin, owner of Clover Toys in Seattle.
What she wanted to do was use her storefront window to sell merchandise to patrons who were no longer able to walk into her store. When a staff member mentioned that you could use a QR code generator like this one to load inventory onto pedestrians’ cell phones, she decided to give it a try.
Just a generation or two ago, many Americans cherished the tradition of going to town or heading downtown to enjoy the lavish holiday window displays crafted by local retailers. The mercantile goal of this form of entertainment was to entice passersby indoors for a shopping spree. It’s time to bring this back in 2020, with the twist of labeling products with QR codes and pairing them with desirable methods of delivery, whether through a drive-up window, curbside, or delivery.
“We’ve even gotten late night sales,” Bolin told me when I spoke with her after my colleague Rob Ousbey pointed out this charming and smart independent retail shop to me.
If your business locations are in good areas for foot traffic, think of how a 24/7 asset like an actionable, goodie-packed window display could boost your sales.
6) Tie in with DIY, and consider kits
With so many customers housebound, anything your business can do to support activities and deliver supplies for domestic merrymaking is worth considering. Can your business tie in with decorating, baking, cooking, crafting, handmade gift-giving, home entertainment, or related themes? If so, create video tutorials, blog posts, GMB posts, social media tips, or other content to engage a local audience.
One complaint I am encountering frequently is that shoppers are feeling tired trying to piecemeal together components from the internet for something they want to make or do. Unsurprisingly, many people are longing for the days when they could leisurely browse local businesses in-person, taking inspiration from their hands-on interaction with merchandise. I think kits could offer a stopgap solution in some cases. If relevant to your business, consider bundling items that could provide everything a household needs to:
Prepare a special holiday meal
Bake treats
Outfit a yard for winter play
Trim a tree or decorate a home
Build a fire
Create a night of fun for children of various age groups
Dress appropriately for warmth and safety, based on region
Create a handmade gift, craft, or garment
Winter prep a home or vehicle
Create a complete home spa/health/beauty experience
Plant a spring garden
Kits could be a welcome all-in-one resource for many shoppers. Determine whether your brand has the components to offer one.
7) Manage reviews meticulously
Free, near-real-time quality control data from your holiday efforts can most easily be found in your review profiles. Use software like Moz Local to keep a running tally of your incoming new reviews, or assign a staff member at each location of your business to monitor your local business profiles daily for any complaints or questions.
If you can quickly solve problems people cite in their reviews, your chances are good of retaining the customer and demonstrating responsiveness to all your profiles’ visitors. You may even find that reviews turn up additional, unmet local needs your formal survey missed. Acting quickly to fulfill these requests could win you additional business in Q4 and beyond.
8) Highly publicize one extra reason to shop local this year
“72% of respondents...are likely or very likely to continue to shop at independent stores, either locally or online, above larger retailers such as Amazon.” — Bazaarvoice
I highly recommend reading the entire survey of 12,000 global respondents by Bazaarvoice, quantifying how substantially shopping behaviors have changed in 2020. It’s very good news for local business owners that so many customers want to keep transacting with nearby independents, but the Amazon dilemma remains.
Above, we discussed the fatigue that can result from trying to cobble together a bunch of different resources to check everything off a shopping list. This can drive people to online “everything stores”, in the same way that department stores, supermarkets, and malls have historically drawn in shoppers with the promise of convenience.
A question every local brand should do their best to ask and answer in the runup to the holidays is: What’s to prevent my community from simply taking their whole holiday shopping list to Amazon, or Walmart, or Target this year?
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
My completely personal answer to this question is that I want my town’s local business district, with its local flavor and diversity of shops, to still be there after a vaccine is hopefully developed for COVID-19. But that’s just me. Inspiring your customers’ allegiance to keeping your business going might be best supported by publicizing some of the following:
The economic, societal, and mental health benefits proven to stem from the presence of small, local businesses in a community.
Your philanthropic tie-ins, such as generating a percentage of sales to worthy local causes — there are so many ways to contribute this year.
The historic role your business has played in making your community a good place to live, particularly if your brand is an older, well-established one. I hear nostalgia is a strong influencer in 2020, and old images of your community and company through the years could be engaging content.
Any recent improvements you’ve made to ensure fast home delivery, whether by postal mail or via local drivers who can get gifts right to people’s doors.
Uplifting content that simply makes the day a bit brighter for a shopper. We’re all looking for a little extra support these days to keep our spirits bright.
Be intentional about maximizing local publicity of your “extra reason” to shop with you. Your local newspaper is doubtless running a stream of commentary about the economic picture in your city, and if your special efforts are newsworthy, a few mentions could do you a lot of good.
Don’t underestimate just how reliant people have become on the recommendations of friends, family, and online platforms for sourcing even the basics of life these days. In my own circle, everyone is now regularly telling everyone else where to find items from hand sanitizer to decent potatoes. Networking will be happening around gifts, too, so anything you get noticed for could support extensive word-of-mouth information sharing.
I want to close by thanking you for being in or marketing businesses that will help us all celebrate the many upcoming holidays in our own ways. Your efforts are appreciated, and I’m wishing you a peaceful, profitable, and hyggelig finish to 2020.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
camerasieunhovn · 4 years
Text
My 8 Best Local SEO Tips for the 2020 Holidays
Posted by MiriamEllis

Image credit: DoSchu
“No place like home for the holidays.” This will be the refrain for the majority of your customers as we reach 2020’s peak shopping season. I can’t think of another year in which it’s been more important for local businesses to plan and implement a seasonal marketing strategy extra early, to connect up with customers who will be traveling less and seeking ways to celebrate at home.
Recently, it’s become trendy in multiple countries to try to capture the old Danish spirit of hygge, which the OED defines as: A quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.
While this sometimes-elusive state of being isn’t something you can buy direct from a store, and while some shoppers are still unfamiliar with hygge by name, many will be trying to create it at home this year. Denmark buys more candles than any other nation, and across Scandinavia, fondness for flowers, warming foods, cozy drinks, and time with loved ones characterizes the work of weaving a gentle web of happiness into even the darkest of winters.
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
1) Survey customers now and provide what they want
Reasonably-priced survey software is worth every penny in 2020. For as little as $20/month, your local business can understand exactly how much your customers’ needs have changed this past year by surveying:
Which products locals are having trouble locating
Which products/services they most want for the holidays
Which method of shopping/delivery would be most convenient for them
Which hours of operation would be most helpful
Which safety measures are must-haves for them to transact with a business
Which payment methods are current top choices
Doubtless, you can think of many questions like these to help you glean the most possible insight into local needs. Poll your customer email/text database and keep your surveys on the short side to avoid abandonment.
Don’t have the necessary tools to poll people at-the-ready? Check out Zapier’s roundup of the 10 Best Online Survey Apps in 2020 and craft a concise survey geared to deliver insights into customers’ wishes.
2) Put your company’s whole heart into affinity
If I could gift every local business owner with a mantra to carry them through not just the 2020 holiday shopping season, but into 2021, it would be this:
It’s not enough to have customers discover my brand — I need them to like my brand.
Chances are, you can call to mind some brands of which you’re highly aware but would never shop with because they don’t meet your personal or business standards in some way. You’ve discovered these brands, but you don’t like them. In 2020, you may even have silently or overtly boycotted them.
On the opposite side of this scenario are the local brands you love. I can wax poetic about my local independent grocery store, stocking its shelves with sustainable products from local farmers, flying its Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ flags with pride from its storefront, and treating every customer like a cherished neighbor.
For many years, our SEO industry has put great effort into and emphasis on the discovery phase of the consumer journey, but my little country-town grocer has gone leaps and bounds beyond this by demonstrating affinity with the things my household cares about. The owners can consider us lifetime loyal customers for the ways they are going above-and-beyond in terms of empathy, diversity, and care for our community.
I vigorously encourage your business to put customer-brand affinity at the heart of its holiday strategy. Brainstorm how you can make meaningful changes that declare your company’s commitment to being part of the work of positive social change.
3) Be as accessible and communicative as possible
Once you’ve accomplished the above two goals, open the lines of communication about what your brand offers and the people-friendly aspects of how you operate across as many of the following as possible:
Website
Local business listings
Email
Social channels
Forms
Texts/Messaging
Phone on-hold marketing
Storefront and in-store signage
Local news, radio, and TV media
In my 17 years as a local SEO, I can confidently say that local business listings have never been a greater potential asset than they will be this holiday season. Google My Business listings, in particular, are an interface that can answer almost any customer who-what-where-when-why — if your business is managing these properly, whether manually or via software like Moz Local.
Anywhere a customer might be looking for what you offer, be there with accurate and abundant information about identity, location, hours of operation, policies, culture, and offerings. From setting special hours for each of your locations, to embracing Google Posts to microblog holiday content, to ensuring your website and social profiles are publicizing your USP, make your biggest communications effort ever this year.
At the same time, be sure you’re meeting Google’s mobile-friendly standards, and that your website is ADA-compliant so that no customer is left out. Provide a fast, intuitive, and inclusive experience to keep customers engaged.
With the pandemic necessitating social distancing, make the Internet your workhorse for connecting up with and provisioning your community as much as you can.
4) Embrace local e-commerce and product listings
Digital Commerce 360 has done a good job charting the 30%+ rise in online sales in the first half or 2020, largely resulting from the pandemic. The same publication summarizes the collective 19% leap in traffic to North America’s largest retailers. At the local business level, implementing even basic e-commerce function in advance of the holiday season could make a major difference, if you can find the most-desired methods of delivery. These could include:
Buy-online, pick up in-store (BOPIS)
Buy-online, pick up curbside
Buy online for postal delivery
Buy online for direct home delivery by in-house or third-party drivers
Here’s an extensive comparison of popular e-commerce solutions, including which ones have free trials, and the e-commerce column of the Moz blog is a free library of expert advice on optimizing digital sales.
Put your products everywhere you can. Don’t forget that this past April, Google surprised everybody by offering free product listings, and that they also recently acquired the Pointy device, which lets you transform scanned barcodes into online inventory pages.
Additionally, in mid-September, Google took their next big product-related step by adding a “nearby” filter to Google Shopping, taking us closer and closer to the search engine becoming a source for real-time local inventory, as I’ve been predicting here in my column for several years.
Implement the public safety protocols that review research from GatherUp shows consumers are demanding, get your inventory onto the web, identify the most convenient ways to get purchases from your storefront into the customer’s hands, and your efforts could pave the way for increased Q4 profits.
5) Reinvent window shopping with QR codes
“How can I do what I want to do?” asked Jennifer Bolin, owner of Clover Toys in Seattle.
What she wanted to do was use her storefront window to sell merchandise to patrons who were no longer able to walk into her store. When a staff member mentioned that you could use a QR code generator like this one to load inventory onto pedestrians’ cell phones, she decided to give it a try.
Just a generation or two ago, many Americans cherished the tradition of going to town or heading downtown to enjoy the lavish holiday window displays crafted by local retailers. The mercantile goal of this form of entertainment was to entice passersby indoors for a shopping spree. It’s time to bring this back in 2020, with the twist of labeling products with QR codes and pairing them with desirable methods of delivery, whether through a drive-up window, curbside, or delivery.
“We’ve even gotten late night sales,” Bolin told me when I spoke with her after my colleague Rob Ousbey pointed out this charming and smart independent retail shop to me.
If your business locations are in good areas for foot traffic, think of how a 24/7 asset like an actionable, goodie-packed window display could boost your sales.
6) Tie in with DIY, and consider kits
With so many customers housebound, anything your business can do to support activities and deliver supplies for domestic merrymaking is worth considering. Can your business tie in with decorating, baking, cooking, crafting, handmade gift-giving, home entertainment, or related themes? If so, create video tutorials, blog posts, GMB posts, social media tips, or other content to engage a local audience.
One complaint I am encountering frequently is that shoppers are feeling tired trying to piecemeal together components from the internet for something they want to make or do. Unsurprisingly, many people are longing for the days when they could leisurely browse local businesses in-person, taking inspiration from their hands-on interaction with merchandise. I think kits could offer a stopgap solution in some cases. If relevant to your business, consider bundling items that could provide everything a household needs to:
Prepare a special holiday meal
Bake treats
Outfit a yard for winter play
Trim a tree or decorate a home
Build a fire
Create a night of fun for children of various age groups
Dress appropriately for warmth and safety, based on region
Create a handmade gift, craft, or garment
Winter prep a home or vehicle
Create a complete home spa/health/beauty experience
Plant a spring garden
Kits could be a welcome all-in-one resource for many shoppers. Determine whether your brand has the components to offer one.
7) Manage reviews meticulously
Free, near-real-time quality control data from your holiday efforts can most easily be found in your review profiles. Use software like Moz Local to keep a running tally of your incoming new reviews, or assign a staff member at each location of your business to monitor your local business profiles daily for any complaints or questions.
If you can quickly solve problems people cite in their reviews, your chances are good of retaining the customer and demonstrating responsiveness to all your profiles’ visitors. You may even find that reviews turn up additional, unmet local needs your formal survey missed. Acting quickly to fulfill these requests could win you additional business in Q4 and beyond.
8) Highly publicize one extra reason to shop local this year
“72% of respondents...are likely or very likely to continue to shop at independent stores, either locally or online, above larger retailers such as Amazon.” — Bazaarvoice
I highly recommend reading the entire survey of 12,000 global respondents by Bazaarvoice, quantifying how substantially shopping behaviors have changed in 2020. It’s very good news for local business owners that so many customers want to keep transacting with nearby independents, but the Amazon dilemma remains.
Above, we discussed the fatigue that can result from trying to cobble together a bunch of different resources to check everything off a shopping list. This can drive people to online “everything stores”, in the same way that department stores, supermarkets, and malls have historically drawn in shoppers with the promise of convenience.
A question every local brand should do their best to ask and answer in the runup to the holidays is: What’s to prevent my community from simply taking their whole holiday shopping list to Amazon, or Walmart, or Target this year?
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
My completely personal answer to this question is that I want my town’s local business district, with its local flavor and diversity of shops, to still be there after a vaccine is hopefully developed for COVID-19. But that’s just me. Inspiring your customers’ allegiance to keeping your business going might be best supported by publicizing some of the following:
The economic, societal, and mental health benefits proven to stem from the presence of small, local businesses in a community.
Your philanthropic tie-ins, such as generating a percentage of sales to worthy local causes — there are so many ways to contribute this year.
The historic role your business has played in making your community a good place to live, particularly if your brand is an older, well-established one. I hear nostalgia is a strong influencer in 2020, and old images of your community and company through the years could be engaging content.
Any recent improvements you’ve made to ensure fast home delivery, whether by postal mail or via local drivers who can get gifts right to people’s doors.
Uplifting content that simply makes the day a bit brighter for a shopper. We’re all looking for a little extra support these days to keep our spirits bright.
Be intentional about maximizing local publicity of your “extra reason” to shop with you. Your local newspaper is doubtless running a stream of commentary about the economic picture in your city, and if your special efforts are newsworthy, a few mentions could do you a lot of good.
Don’t underestimate just how reliant people have become on the recommendations of friends, family, and online platforms for sourcing even the basics of life these days. In my own circle, everyone is now regularly telling everyone else where to find items from hand sanitizer to decent potatoes. Networking will be happening around gifts, too, so anything you get noticed for could support extensive word-of-mouth information sharing.
I want to close by thanking you for being in or marketing businesses that will help us all celebrate the many upcoming holidays in our own ways. Your efforts are appreciated, and I’m wishing you a peaceful, profitable, and hyggelig finish to 2020.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
1 note · View note
ductrungnguyen87 · 4 years
Text
My 8 Best Local SEO Tips for the 2020 Holidays
Posted by MiriamEllis

Image credit: DoSchu
“No place like home for the holidays.” This will be the refrain for the majority of your customers as we reach 2020’s peak shopping season. I can’t think of another year in which it’s been more important for local businesses to plan and implement a seasonal marketing strategy extra early, to connect up with customers who will be traveling less and seeking ways to celebrate at home.
Recently, it’s become trendy in multiple countries to try to capture the old Danish spirit of hygge, which the OED defines as: A quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.
While this sometimes-elusive state of being isn’t something you can buy direct from a store, and while some shoppers are still unfamiliar with hygge by name, many will be trying to create it at home this year. Denmark buys more candles than any other nation, and across Scandinavia, fondness for flowers, warming foods, cozy drinks, and time with loved ones characterizes the work of weaving a gentle web of happiness into even the darkest of winters.
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
1) Survey customers now and provide what they want
Reasonably-priced survey software is worth every penny in 2020. For as little as $20/month, your local business can understand exactly how much your customers’ needs have changed this past year by surveying:
Which products locals are having trouble locating
Which products/services they most want for the holidays
Which method of shopping/delivery would be most convenient for them
Which hours of operation would be most helpful
Which safety measures are must-haves for them to transact with a business
Which payment methods are current top choices
Doubtless, you can think of many questions like these to help you glean the most possible insight into local needs. Poll your customer email/text database and keep your surveys on the short side to avoid abandonment.
Don’t have the necessary tools to poll people at-the-ready? Check out Zapier’s roundup of the 10 Best Online Survey Apps in 2020 and craft a concise survey geared to deliver insights into customers’ wishes.
2) Put your company’s whole heart into affinity
If I could gift every local business owner with a mantra to carry them through not just the 2020 holiday shopping season, but into 2021, it would be this:
It’s not enough to have customers discover my brand — I need them to like my brand.
Chances are, you can call to mind some brands of which you’re highly aware but would never shop with because they don’t meet your personal or business standards in some way. You’ve discovered these brands, but you don’t like them. In 2020, you may even have silently or overtly boycotted them.
On the opposite side of this scenario are the local brands you love. I can wax poetic about my local independent grocery store, stocking its shelves with sustainable products from local farmers, flying its Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ flags with pride from its storefront, and treating every customer like a cherished neighbor.
For many years, our SEO industry has put great effort into and emphasis on the discovery phase of the consumer journey, but my little country-town grocer has gone leaps and bounds beyond this by demonstrating affinity with the things my household cares about. The owners can consider us lifetime loyal customers for the ways they are going above-and-beyond in terms of empathy, diversity, and care for our community.
I vigorously encourage your business to put customer-brand affinity at the heart of its holiday strategy. Brainstorm how you can make meaningful changes that declare your company’s commitment to being part of the work of positive social change.
3) Be as accessible and communicative as possible
Once you’ve accomplished the above two goals, open the lines of communication about what your brand offers and the people-friendly aspects of how you operate across as many of the following as possible:
Website
Local business listings
Email
Social channels
Forms
Texts/Messaging
Phone on-hold marketing
Storefront and in-store signage
Local news, radio, and TV media
In my 17 years as a local SEO, I can confidently say that local business listings have never been a greater potential asset than they will be this holiday season. Google My Business listings, in particular, are an interface that can answer almost any customer who-what-where-when-why — if your business is managing these properly, whether manually or via software like Moz Local.
Anywhere a customer might be looking for what you offer, be there with accurate and abundant information about identity, location, hours of operation, policies, culture, and offerings. From setting special hours for each of your locations, to embracing Google Posts to microblog holiday content, to ensuring your website and social profiles are publicizing your USP, make your biggest communications effort ever this year.
At the same time, be sure you’re meeting Google’s mobile-friendly standards, and that your website is ADA-compliant so that no customer is left out. Provide a fast, intuitive, and inclusive experience to keep customers engaged.
With the pandemic necessitating social distancing, make the Internet your workhorse for connecting up with and provisioning your community as much as you can.
4) Embrace local e-commerce and product listings
Digital Commerce 360 has done a good job charting the 30%+ rise in online sales in the first half or 2020, largely resulting from the pandemic. The same publication summarizes the collective 19% leap in traffic to North America’s largest retailers. At the local business level, implementing even basic e-commerce function in advance of the holiday season could make a major difference, if you can find the most-desired methods of delivery. These could include:
Buy-online, pick up in-store (BOPIS)
Buy-online, pick up curbside
Buy online for postal delivery
Buy online for direct home delivery by in-house or third-party drivers
Here’s an extensive comparison of popular e-commerce solutions, including which ones have free trials, and the e-commerce column of the Moz blog is a free library of expert advice on optimizing digital sales.
Put your products everywhere you can. Don’t forget that this past April, Google surprised everybody by offering free product listings, and that they also recently acquired the Pointy device, which lets you transform scanned barcodes into online inventory pages.
Additionally, in mid-September, Google took their next big product-related step by adding a “nearby” filter to Google Shopping, taking us closer and closer to the search engine becoming a source for real-time local inventory, as I’ve been predicting here in my column for several years.
Implement the public safety protocols that review research from GatherUp shows consumers are demanding, get your inventory onto the web, identify the most convenient ways to get purchases from your storefront into the customer’s hands, and your efforts could pave the way for increased Q4 profits.
5) Reinvent window shopping with QR codes
“How can I do what I want to do?” asked Jennifer Bolin, owner of Clover Toys in Seattle.
What she wanted to do was use her storefront window to sell merchandise to patrons who were no longer able to walk into her store. When a staff member mentioned that you could use a QR code generator like this one to load inventory onto pedestrians’ cell phones, she decided to give it a try.
Just a generation or two ago, many Americans cherished the tradition of going to town or heading downtown to enjoy the lavish holiday window displays crafted by local retailers. The mercantile goal of this form of entertainment was to entice passersby indoors for a shopping spree. It’s time to bring this back in 2020, with the twist of labeling products with QR codes and pairing them with desirable methods of delivery, whether through a drive-up window, curbside, or delivery.
“We’ve even gotten late night sales,” Bolin told me when I spoke with her after my colleague Rob Ousbey pointed out this charming and smart independent retail shop to me.
If your business locations are in good areas for foot traffic, think of how a 24/7 asset like an actionable, goodie-packed window display could boost your sales.
6) Tie in with DIY, and consider kits
With so many customers housebound, anything your business can do to support activities and deliver supplies for domestic merrymaking is worth considering. Can your business tie in with decorating, baking, cooking, crafting, handmade gift-giving, home entertainment, or related themes? If so, create video tutorials, blog posts, GMB posts, social media tips, or other content to engage a local audience.
One complaint I am encountering frequently is that shoppers are feeling tired trying to piecemeal together components from the internet for something they want to make or do. Unsurprisingly, many people are longing for the days when they could leisurely browse local businesses in-person, taking inspiration from their hands-on interaction with merchandise. I think kits could offer a stopgap solution in some cases. If relevant to your business, consider bundling items that could provide everything a household needs to:
Prepare a special holiday meal
Bake treats
Outfit a yard for winter play
Trim a tree or decorate a home
Build a fire
Create a night of fun for children of various age groups
Dress appropriately for warmth and safety, based on region
Create a handmade gift, craft, or garment
Winter prep a home or vehicle
Create a complete home spa/health/beauty experience
Plant a spring garden
Kits could be a welcome all-in-one resource for many shoppers. Determine whether your brand has the components to offer one.
7) Manage reviews meticulously
Free, near-real-time quality control data from your holiday efforts can most easily be found in your review profiles. Use software like Moz Local to keep a running tally of your incoming new reviews, or assign a staff member at each location of your business to monitor your local business profiles daily for any complaints or questions.
If you can quickly solve problems people cite in their reviews, your chances are good of retaining the customer and demonstrating responsiveness to all your profiles’ visitors. You may even find that reviews turn up additional, unmet local needs your formal survey missed. Acting quickly to fulfill these requests could win you additional business in Q4 and beyond.
8) Highly publicize one extra reason to shop local this year
“72% of respondents...are likely or very likely to continue to shop at independent stores, either locally or online, above larger retailers such as Amazon.” — Bazaarvoice
I highly recommend reading the entire survey of 12,000 global respondents by Bazaarvoice, quantifying how substantially shopping behaviors have changed in 2020. It’s very good news for local business owners that so many customers want to keep transacting with nearby independents, but the Amazon dilemma remains.
Above, we discussed the fatigue that can result from trying to cobble together a bunch of different resources to check everything off a shopping list. This can drive people to online “everything stores”, in the same way that department stores, supermarkets, and malls have historically drawn in shoppers with the promise of convenience.
A question every local brand should do their best to ask and answer in the runup to the holidays is: What’s to prevent my community from simply taking their whole holiday shopping list to Amazon, or Walmart, or Target this year?
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
My completely personal answer to this question is that I want my town’s local business district, with its local flavor and diversity of shops, to still be there after a vaccine is hopefully developed for COVID-19. But that’s just me. Inspiring your customers’ allegiance to keeping your business going might be best supported by publicizing some of the following:
The economic, societal, and mental health benefits proven to stem from the presence of small, local businesses in a community.
Your philanthropic tie-ins, such as generating a percentage of sales to worthy local causes — there are so many ways to contribute this year.
The historic role your business has played in making your community a good place to live, particularly if your brand is an older, well-established one. I hear nostalgia is a strong influencer in 2020, and old images of your community and company through the years could be engaging content.
Any recent improvements you’ve made to ensure fast home delivery, whether by postal mail or via local drivers who can get gifts right to people’s doors.
Uplifting content that simply makes the day a bit brighter for a shopper. We’re all looking for a little extra support these days to keep our spirits bright.
Be intentional about maximizing local publicity of your “extra reason” to shop with you. Your local newspaper is doubtless running a stream of commentary about the economic picture in your city, and if your special efforts are newsworthy, a few mentions could do you a lot of good.
Don’t underestimate just how reliant people have become on the recommendations of friends, family, and online platforms for sourcing even the basics of life these days. In my own circle, everyone is now regularly telling everyone else where to find items from hand sanitizer to decent potatoes. Networking will be happening around gifts, too, so anything you get noticed for could support extensive word-of-mouth information sharing.
I want to close by thanking you for being in or marketing businesses that will help us all celebrate the many upcoming holidays in our own ways. Your efforts are appreciated, and I’m wishing you a peaceful, profitable, and hyggelig finish to 2020.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
gamebazu · 4 years
Text
My 8 Best Local SEO Tips for the 2020 Holidays
Posted by MiriamEllis

Image credit: DoSchu
“No place like home for the holidays.” This will be the refrain for the majority of your customers as we reach 2020’s peak shopping season. I can’t think of another year in which it’s been more important for local businesses to plan and implement a seasonal marketing strategy extra early, to connect up with customers who will be traveling less and seeking ways to celebrate at home.
Recently, it’s become trendy in multiple countries to try to capture the old Danish spirit of hygge, which the OED defines as: A quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.
While this sometimes-elusive state of being isn’t something you can buy direct from a store, and while some shoppers are still unfamiliar with hygge by name, many will be trying to create it at home this year. Denmark buys more candles than any other nation, and across Scandinavia, fondness for flowers, warming foods, cozy drinks, and time with loved ones characterizes the work of weaving a gentle web of happiness into even the darkest of winters.
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
1) Survey customers now and provide what they want
Reasonably-priced survey software is worth every penny in 2020. For as little as $20/month, your local business can understand exactly how much your customers’ needs have changed this past year by surveying:
Which products locals are having trouble locating
Which products/services they most want for the holidays
Which method of shopping/delivery would be most convenient for them
Which hours of operation would be most helpful
Which safety measures are must-haves for them to transact with a business
Which payment methods are current top choices
Doubtless, you can think of many questions like these to help you glean the most possible insight into local needs. Poll your customer email/text database and keep your surveys on the short side to avoid abandonment.
Don’t have the necessary tools to poll people at-the-ready? Check out Zapier’s roundup of the 10 Best Online Survey Apps in 2020 and craft a concise survey geared to deliver insights into customers’ wishes.
2) Put your company’s whole heart into affinity
If I could gift every local business owner with a mantra to carry them through not just the 2020 holiday shopping season, but into 2021, it would be this:
It’s not enough to have customers discover my brand — I need them to like my brand.
Chances are, you can call to mind some brands of which you’re highly aware but would never shop with because they don’t meet your personal or business standards in some way. You’ve discovered these brands, but you don’t like them. In 2020, you may even have silently or overtly boycotted them.
On the opposite side of this scenario are the local brands you love. I can wax poetic about my local independent grocery store, stocking its shelves with sustainable products from local farmers, flying its Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ flags with pride from its storefront, and treating every customer like a cherished neighbor.
For many years, our SEO industry has put great effort into and emphasis on the discovery phase of the consumer journey, but my little country-town grocer has gone leaps and bounds beyond this by demonstrating affinity with the things my household cares about. The owners can consider us lifetime loyal customers for the ways they are going above-and-beyond in terms of empathy, diversity, and care for our community.
I vigorously encourage your business to put customer-brand affinity at the heart of its holiday strategy. Brainstorm how you can make meaningful changes that declare your company’s commitment to being part of the work of positive social change.
3) Be as accessible and communicative as possible
Once you’ve accomplished the above two goals, open the lines of communication about what your brand offers and the people-friendly aspects of how you operate across as many of the following as possible:
Website
Local business listings
Email
Social channels
Forms
Texts/Messaging
Phone on-hold marketing
Storefront and in-store signage
Local news, radio, and TV media
In my 17 years as a local SEO, I can confidently say that local business listings have never been a greater potential asset than they will be this holiday season. Google My Business listings, in particular, are an interface that can answer almost any customer who-what-where-when-why — if your business is managing these properly, whether manually or via software like Moz Local.
Anywhere a customer might be looking for what you offer, be there with accurate and abundant information about identity, location, hours of operation, policies, culture, and offerings. From setting special hours for each of your locations, to embracing Google Posts to microblog holiday content, to ensuring your website and social profiles are publicizing your USP, make your biggest communications effort ever this year.
At the same time, be sure you’re meeting Google’s mobile-friendly standards, and that your website is ADA-compliant so that no customer is left out. Provide a fast, intuitive, and inclusive experience to keep customers engaged.
With the pandemic necessitating social distancing, make the Internet your workhorse for connecting up with and provisioning your community as much as you can.
4) Embrace local e-commerce and product listings
Digital Commerce 360 has done a good job charting the 30%+ rise in online sales in the first half or 2020, largely resulting from the pandemic. The same publication summarizes the collective 19% leap in traffic to North America’s largest retailers. At the local business level, implementing even basic e-commerce function in advance of the holiday season could make a major difference, if you can find the most-desired methods of delivery. These could include:
Buy-online, pick up in-store (BOPIS)
Buy-online, pick up curbside
Buy online for postal delivery
Buy online for direct home delivery by in-house or third-party drivers
Here’s an extensive comparison of popular e-commerce solutions, including which ones have free trials, and the e-commerce column of the Moz blog is a free library of expert advice on optimizing digital sales.
Put your products everywhere you can. Don’t forget that this past April, Google surprised everybody by offering free product listings, and that they also recently acquired the Pointy device, which lets you transform scanned barcodes into online inventory pages.
Additionally, in mid-September, Google took their next big product-related step by adding a “nearby” filter to Google Shopping, taking us closer and closer to the search engine becoming a source for real-time local inventory, as I’ve been predicting here in my column for several years.
Implement the public safety protocols that review research from GatherUp shows consumers are demanding, get your inventory onto the web, identify the most convenient ways to get purchases from your storefront into the customer’s hands, and your efforts could pave the way for increased Q4 profits.
5) Reinvent window shopping with QR codes
“How can I do what I want to do?” asked Jennifer Bolin, owner of Clover Toys in Seattle.
What she wanted to do was use her storefront window to sell merchandise to patrons who were no longer able to walk into her store. When a staff member mentioned that you could use a QR code generator like this one to load inventory onto pedestrians’ cell phones, she decided to give it a try.
Just a generation or two ago, many Americans cherished the tradition of going to town or heading downtown to enjoy the lavish holiday window displays crafted by local retailers. The mercantile goal of this form of entertainment was to entice passersby indoors for a shopping spree. It’s time to bring this back in 2020, with the twist of labeling products with QR codes and pairing them with desirable methods of delivery, whether through a drive-up window, curbside, or delivery.
“We’ve even gotten late night sales,” Bolin told me when I spoke with her after my colleague Rob Ousbey pointed out this charming and smart independent retail shop to me.
If your business locations are in good areas for foot traffic, think of how a 24/7 asset like an actionable, goodie-packed window display could boost your sales.
6) Tie in with DIY, and consider kits
With so many customers housebound, anything your business can do to support activities and deliver supplies for domestic merrymaking is worth considering. Can your business tie in with decorating, baking, cooking, crafting, handmade gift-giving, home entertainment, or related themes? If so, create video tutorials, blog posts, GMB posts, social media tips, or other content to engage a local audience.
One complaint I am encountering frequently is that shoppers are feeling tired trying to piecemeal together components from the internet for something they want to make or do. Unsurprisingly, many people are longing for the days when they could leisurely browse local businesses in-person, taking inspiration from their hands-on interaction with merchandise. I think kits could offer a stopgap solution in some cases. If relevant to your business, consider bundling items that could provide everything a household needs to:
Prepare a special holiday meal
Bake treats
Outfit a yard for winter play
Trim a tree or decorate a home
Build a fire
Create a night of fun for children of various age groups
Dress appropriately for warmth and safety, based on region
Create a handmade gift, craft, or garment
Winter prep a home or vehicle
Create a complete home spa/health/beauty experience
Plant a spring garden
Kits could be a welcome all-in-one resource for many shoppers. Determine whether your brand has the components to offer one.
7) Manage reviews meticulously
Free, near-real-time quality control data from your holiday efforts can most easily be found in your review profiles. Use software like Moz Local to keep a running tally of your incoming new reviews, or assign a staff member at each location of your business to monitor your local business profiles daily for any complaints or questions.
If you can quickly solve problems people cite in their reviews, your chances are good of retaining the customer and demonstrating responsiveness to all your profiles’ visitors. You may even find that reviews turn up additional, unmet local needs your formal survey missed. Acting quickly to fulfill these requests could win you additional business in Q4 and beyond.
8) Highly publicize one extra reason to shop local this year
“72% of respondents...are likely or very likely to continue to shop at independent stores, either locally or online, above larger retailers such as Amazon.” — Bazaarvoice
I highly recommend reading the entire survey of 12,000 global respondents by Bazaarvoice, quantifying how substantially shopping behaviors have changed in 2020. It’s very good news for local business owners that so many customers want to keep transacting with nearby independents, but the Amazon dilemma remains.
Above, we discussed the fatigue that can result from trying to cobble together a bunch of different resources to check everything off a shopping list. This can drive people to online “everything stores”, in the same way that department stores, supermarkets, and malls have historically drawn in shoppers with the promise of convenience.
A question every local brand should do their best to ask and answer in the runup to the holidays is: What’s to prevent my community from simply taking their whole holiday shopping list to Amazon, or Walmart, or Target this year?
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
My completely personal answer to this question is that I want my town’s local business district, with its local flavor and diversity of shops, to still be there after a vaccine is hopefully developed for COVID-19. But that’s just me. Inspiring your customers’ allegiance to keeping your business going might be best supported by publicizing some of the following:
The economic, societal, and mental health benefits proven to stem from the presence of small, local businesses in a community.
Your philanthropic tie-ins, such as generating a percentage of sales to worthy local causes — there are so many ways to contribute this year.
The historic role your business has played in making your community a good place to live, particularly if your brand is an older, well-established one. I hear nostalgia is a strong influencer in 2020, and old images of your community and company through the years could be engaging content.
Any recent improvements you’ve made to ensure fast home delivery, whether by postal mail or via local drivers who can get gifts right to people’s doors.
Uplifting content that simply makes the day a bit brighter for a shopper. We’re all looking for a little extra support these days to keep our spirits bright.
Be intentional about maximizing local publicity of your “extra reason” to shop with you. Your local newspaper is doubtless running a stream of commentary about the economic picture in your city, and if your special efforts are newsworthy, a few mentions could do you a lot of good.
Don’t underestimate just how reliant people have become on the recommendations of friends, family, and online platforms for sourcing even the basics of life these days. In my own circle, everyone is now regularly telling everyone else where to find items from hand sanitizer to decent potatoes. Networking will be happening around gifts, too, so anything you get noticed for could support extensive word-of-mouth information sharing.
I want to close by thanking you for being in or marketing businesses that will help us all celebrate the many upcoming holidays in our own ways. Your efforts are appreciated, and I’m wishing you a peaceful, profitable, and hyggelig finish to 2020.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
https://ift.tt/33dUlhQ
0 notes
kjt-lawyers · 4 years
Text
My 8 Best Local SEO Tips for the 2020 Holidays
Posted by MiriamEllis

Image credit: DoSchu
“No place like home for the holidays.” This will be the refrain for the majority of your customers as we reach 2020’s peak shopping season. I can’t think of another year in which it’s been more important for local businesses to plan and implement a seasonal marketing strategy extra early, to connect up with customers who will be traveling less and seeking ways to celebrate at home.
Recently, it’s become trendy in multiple countries to try to capture the old Danish spirit of hygge, which the OED defines as: A quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.
While this sometimes-elusive state of being isn’t something you can buy direct from a store, and while some shoppers are still unfamiliar with hygge by name, many will be trying to create it at home this year. Denmark buys more candles than any other nation, and across Scandinavia, fondness for flowers, warming foods, cozy drinks, and time with loved ones characterizes the work of weaving a gentle web of happiness into even the darkest of winters.
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
1) Survey customers now and provide what they want
Reasonably-priced survey software is worth every penny in 2020. For as little as $20/month, your local business can understand exactly how much your customers’ needs have changed this past year by surveying:
Which products locals are having trouble locating
Which products/services they most want for the holidays
Which method of shopping/delivery would be most convenient for them
Which hours of operation would be most helpful
Which safety measures are must-haves for them to transact with a business
Which payment methods are current top choices
Doubtless, you can think of many questions like these to help you glean the most possible insight into local needs. Poll your customer email/text database and keep your surveys on the short side to avoid abandonment.
Don’t have the necessary tools to poll people at-the-ready? Check out Zapier’s roundup of the 10 Best Online Survey Apps in 2020 and craft a concise survey geared to deliver insights into customers’ wishes.
2) Put your company’s whole heart into affinity
If I could gift every local business owner with a mantra to carry them through not just the 2020 holiday shopping season, but into 2021, it would be this:
It’s not enough to have customers discover my brand — I need them to like my brand.
Chances are, you can call to mind some brands of which you’re highly aware but would never shop with because they don’t meet your personal or business standards in some way. You’ve discovered these brands, but you don’t like them. In 2020, you may even have silently or overtly boycotted them.
On the opposite side of this scenario are the local brands you love. I can wax poetic about my local independent grocery store, stocking its shelves with sustainable products from local farmers, flying its Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ flags with pride from its storefront, and treating every customer like a cherished neighbor.
For many years, our SEO industry has put great effort into and emphasis on the discovery phase of the consumer journey, but my little country-town grocer has gone leaps and bounds beyond this by demonstrating affinity with the things my household cares about. The owners can consider us lifetime loyal customers for the ways they are going above-and-beyond in terms of empathy, diversity, and care for our community.
I vigorously encourage your business to put customer-brand affinity at the heart of its holiday strategy. Brainstorm how you can make meaningful changes that declare your company’s commitment to being part of the work of positive social change.
3) Be as accessible and communicative as possible
Once you’ve accomplished the above two goals, open the lines of communication about what your brand offers and the people-friendly aspects of how you operate across as many of the following as possible:
Website
Local business listings
Email
Social channels
Forms
Texts/Messaging
Phone on-hold marketing
Storefront and in-store signage
Local news, radio, and TV media
In my 17 years as a local SEO, I can confidently say that local business listings have never been a greater potential asset than they will be this holiday season. Google My Business listings, in particular, are an interface that can answer almost any customer who-what-where-when-why — if your business is managing these properly, whether manually or via software like Moz Local.
Anywhere a customer might be looking for what you offer, be there with accurate and abundant information about identity, location, hours of operation, policies, culture, and offerings. From setting special hours for each of your locations, to embracing Google Posts to microblog holiday content, to ensuring your website and social profiles are publicizing your USP, make your biggest communications effort ever this year.
At the same time, be sure you’re meeting Google’s mobile-friendly standards, and that your website is ADA-compliant so that no customer is left out. Provide a fast, intuitive, and inclusive experience to keep customers engaged.
With the pandemic necessitating social distancing, make the Internet your workhorse for connecting up with and provisioning your community as much as you can.
4) Embrace local e-commerce and product listings
Digital Commerce 360 has done a good job charting the 30%+ rise in online sales in the first half or 2020, largely resulting from the pandemic. The same publication summarizes the collective 19% leap in traffic to North America’s largest retailers. At the local business level, implementing even basic e-commerce function in advance of the holiday season could make a major difference, if you can find the most-desired methods of delivery. These could include:
Buy-online, pick up in-store (BOPIS)
Buy-online, pick up curbside
Buy online for postal delivery
Buy online for direct home delivery by in-house or third-party drivers
Here’s an extensive comparison of popular e-commerce solutions, including which ones have free trials, and the e-commerce column of the Moz blog is a free library of expert advice on optimizing digital sales.
Put your products everywhere you can. Don’t forget that this past April, Google surprised everybody by offering free product listings, and that they also recently acquired the Pointy device, which lets you transform scanned barcodes into online inventory pages.
Additionally, in mid-September, Google took their next big product-related step by adding a “nearby” filter to Google Shopping, taking us closer and closer to the search engine becoming a source for real-time local inventory, as I’ve been predicting here in my column for several years.
Implement the public safety protocols that review research from GatherUp shows consumers are demanding, get your inventory onto the web, identify the most convenient ways to get purchases from your storefront into the customer’s hands, and your efforts could pave the way for increased Q4 profits.
5) Reinvent window shopping with QR codes
“How can I do what I want to do?” asked Jennifer Bolin, owner of Clover Toys in Seattle.
What she wanted to do was use her storefront window to sell merchandise to patrons who were no longer able to walk into her store. When a staff member mentioned that you could use a QR code generator like this one to load inventory onto pedestrians’ cell phones, she decided to give it a try.
Just a generation or two ago, many Americans cherished the tradition of going to town or heading downtown to enjoy the lavish holiday window displays crafted by local retailers. The mercantile goal of this form of entertainment was to entice passersby indoors for a shopping spree. It’s time to bring this back in 2020, with the twist of labeling products with QR codes and pairing them with desirable methods of delivery, whether through a drive-up window, curbside, or delivery.
“We’ve even gotten late night sales,” Bolin told me when I spoke with her after my colleague Rob Ousbey pointed out this charming and smart independent retail shop to me.
If your business locations are in good areas for foot traffic, think of how a 24/7 asset like an actionable, goodie-packed window display could boost your sales.
6) Tie in with DIY, and consider kits
With so many customers housebound, anything your business can do to support activities and deliver supplies for domestic merrymaking is worth considering. Can your business tie in with decorating, baking, cooking, crafting, handmade gift-giving, home entertainment, or related themes? If so, create video tutorials, blog posts, GMB posts, social media tips, or other content to engage a local audience.
One complaint I am encountering frequently is that shoppers are feeling tired trying to piecemeal together components from the internet for something they want to make or do. Unsurprisingly, many people are longing for the days when they could leisurely browse local businesses in-person, taking inspiration from their hands-on interaction with merchandise. I think kits could offer a stopgap solution in some cases. If relevant to your business, consider bundling items that could provide everything a household needs to:
Prepare a special holiday meal
Bake treats
Outfit a yard for winter play
Trim a tree or decorate a home
Build a fire
Create a night of fun for children of various age groups
Dress appropriately for warmth and safety, based on region
Create a handmade gift, craft, or garment
Winter prep a home or vehicle
Create a complete home spa/health/beauty experience
Plant a spring garden
Kits could be a welcome all-in-one resource for many shoppers. Determine whether your brand has the components to offer one.
7) Manage reviews meticulously
Free, near-real-time quality control data from your holiday efforts can most easily be found in your review profiles. Use software like Moz Local to keep a running tally of your incoming new reviews, or assign a staff member at each location of your business to monitor your local business profiles daily for any complaints or questions.
If you can quickly solve problems people cite in their reviews, your chances are good of retaining the customer and demonstrating responsiveness to all your profiles’ visitors. You may even find that reviews turn up additional, unmet local needs your formal survey missed. Acting quickly to fulfill these requests could win you additional business in Q4 and beyond.
8) Highly publicize one extra reason to shop local this year
“72% of respondents...are likely or very likely to continue to shop at independent stores, either locally or online, above larger retailers such as Amazon.” — Bazaarvoice
I highly recommend reading the entire survey of 12,000 global respondents by Bazaarvoice, quantifying how substantially shopping behaviors have changed in 2020. It’s very good news for local business owners that so many customers want to keep transacting with nearby independents, but the Amazon dilemma remains.
Above, we discussed the fatigue that can result from trying to cobble together a bunch of different resources to check everything off a shopping list. This can drive people to online “everything stores”, in the same way that department stores, supermarkets, and malls have historically drawn in shoppers with the promise of convenience.
A question every local brand should do their best to ask and answer in the runup to the holidays is: What’s to prevent my community from simply taking their whole holiday shopping list to Amazon, or Walmart, or Target this year?
Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.
My completely personal answer to this question is that I want my town’s local business district, with its local flavor and diversity of shops, to still be there after a vaccine is hopefully developed for COVID-19. But that’s just me. Inspiring your customers’ allegiance to keeping your business going might be best supported by publicizing some of the following:
The economic, societal, and mental health benefits proven to stem from the presence of small, local businesses in a community.
Your philanthropic tie-ins, such as generating a percentage of sales to worthy local causes — there are so many ways to contribute this year.
The historic role your business has played in making your community a good place to live, particularly if your brand is an older, well-established one. I hear nostalgia is a strong influencer in 2020, and old images of your community and company through the years could be engaging content.
Any recent improvements you’ve made to ensure fast home delivery, whether by postal mail or via local drivers who can get gifts right to people’s doors.
Uplifting content that simply makes the day a bit brighter for a shopper. We’re all looking for a little extra support these days to keep our spirits bright.
Be intentional about maximizing local publicity of your “extra reason” to shop with you. Your local newspaper is doubtless running a stream of commentary about the economic picture in your city, and if your special efforts are newsworthy, a few mentions could do you a lot of good.
Don’t underestimate just how reliant people have become on the recommendations of friends, family, and online platforms for sourcing even the basics of life these days. In my own circle, everyone is now regularly telling everyone else where to find items from hand sanitizer to decent potatoes. Networking will be happening around gifts, too, so anything you get noticed for could support extensive word-of-mouth information sharing.
I want to close by thanking you for being in or marketing businesses that will help us all celebrate the many upcoming holidays in our own ways. Your efforts are appreciated, and I’m wishing you a peaceful, profitable, and hyggelig finish to 2020.
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