At the March meeting, Ryan Haney (of PharrOut) brought up the topic of hosting a local web conference for small business owners to learn about the best ways to make the web work for their businesses. Suggested topics includes SEO, accessibility, online advertising, email marketing and the importance of design.

The idea was to plan and host a small conference, maybe one or 1/2 day to start, and have Refresh members speak to the business owners about their area(s) of expertise.

Is anyone interested in pursuing this further and being involved in the lecture series, and if so, what would you talk about?

Sharif,

I’m all in as I said in the meeting.  I think working with the local chapter of the SBA might give us presenters a good idea as to what small businesses want to learn about, and perhaps we can even make up a survey to send out.  I’d be glad to head all of this up if there’s interest.

Rick

Well hell, let’s do it then.  Definitely talking to the SBA is a thing, and any local business associations like the carytown bussiness alliance or whatever.  Also, there are so many small businesses in the suburbs that it would be great to target and that could really use it.

Rick if you are interested, we should get together and talk about getting things rolling, and anyone else for that matter.

This could take on any number of shapes and I think it will be interesting to see where it goes.  I think refresh:richmond is a great vehicle for this as well especially since refresh is a national movement on a local level.  Good stuff.

Sorry, pretty late in the game on this topic, but I think I can help out here. I will be more than happy to share my experience with working with merchant proccesers and online payment solutions for small business.

I will be at this weeks Refresh meeting, and maybe I can be of some help.

LFD1

Bsaed on tonight’s meeting, I will conduct some research with various resources and find out what small business owners in the area want to learn about.

I think if the confrence can be aimed to how they can increase their bottom line by using the web, and or help them with CRM they will find it usefull.

Great meeting last night, guys! I think we discussed a lot of good points about this conference.

To recap:

– Rick will approach the SBA to see if similar local conferences exist and what the audience needs are. We can tailor our conference to those findings.

– Conduct surveys of small biz owners before and after the conference to furteher determine their needs/interests

– We will build a one-day, well-publicized conference, as opposed to a series of smaller events.

– Will charge the conference attendees, with profits going to speakers and the following conference.

– Session topics/panel discussions may include:

• eCommerce and Online Payments
• Blogging and Podcasting
• SEO/Marketing
• Brand Consistency
• “Human Library” - great idea in which biz owners mingle with each other, find a similar topic if interest and “check out” a panel member for 5-10 minutes of personal discussion

We’re aiming to hold this conference by the end of summer.

Any other thoughts, opinions, session topic ideas, and anything else can be added below. Let’s keep this going!

this thread will be good to hold discussions, but let’s go ahead and move the organizing of information over to a wiki.  I set one up at:

refreshrva.pbwiki.com.

password: refreshrichmond

Great idea, Ryan… thanks for setting that up.

np.  I was thinking about it this morning and it kind of hit me how fast August or September is going to come.  If we are going to have a good chance at doing a good job at promoting this and getting a lot of people there we are definitely going to need to roll on it.

I would like to work on the E-Commerce part, in a prior life I worked in Bank of America’s merchant services, helping set up small businesses for credit card proccessing. I think I can shed some light in that areana.

What areas and aspects of ecommerce do you think we should concentrate on?

Thats a great question. Alot goes into reciving the ability to proccess credit cards for a business. Its a nessisary evil and some merchants have to think about it more than others. Business are broken down to three catagories, A, B and C class business. A typical class A type business is your local pizza place, doctors office or any retail establishment where there is a a face to face transaction and the customer recives their good or service at that time.

Class B business are like your major retailers with an online pressence. A business that has an online store but an actual retail outlet where a customer make make an instore return or exchange of goods.

Class C merchants are any online business, mail order or drop shipping business with 100% future delivery of a good or service and no physcial retail outlet.  In order to recive a competative proccessing rate through and actual bank proccessor stiff criteria have to be met.

In recient years GOOGLE and PAYPAL have become solid alternatives for a small business to accept credit cards online. But, they are not with out there restrictions. Transactional limits, verification holds on funds to veryify the source, can all casuse huge headaches for a small business that is trying to really make money from their online transactions.

Plus not to mention the bible of all credit card transaction: The Rules For VISA Merchants.

http://www.usa.visa.com/download/merchants/rules_for_visa_merchants.pdf

I feel this is all very usefull information for a small business that really wants to get their business moving online.

Not to mention the basics like whats the diffrence between a shopping cart and a payment gateway.

Talking about these issues and the diffrences could be very benificial to a small business.

Sharif,
As I said in the last meeting I would love to help out. I would be interested in talking about branding and the importance of maintaining a consistent online presence. Also, if there is any need for working on a website for the venue I would be interested in talking with you about helping out with that as well.

Sorry, I missed the last meeting.  I too am willing to help out.  I was given a contact over at SCORE (http://www.richmondscore.org) and email him to see if he’d be willing to meet with us and let us know what their clients are most interested in hearing about.  Rick, since you are reaching out to other organizations shoot me your email address so I can let you know if he is willing to meet with us.

If the agenda/interest allows it, I’d be willing to give an overview of customer experience management and some suggestions on how these businesses can take a more holistic approach to engaging their customers across all touch points.  Might support or integrate w/ a branding presentation. 

Thanks!
Chris Eklund

Chris,

Just sent you a PM in response.  I’d like to meet with SCORE at their earliest convenience.  Contact me with any details at rick [at] rickwhittington [dot] com.