Tweet-up in Tampa!!!

It's that time again!! LocalShops1.com and Socially Mediated have partnered up again to bring Saint Pete Tweets' fourth Tweet-up! And this time, we're taking it across the bay ... Our host is the beautiful Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, which has offered free guided tours, snacks and drinks. You just bring your smiling self :)

For those who have never been to a Tweet-up, here's what to expect: awesome people, social and business networking, maybe even a few surprises.

For more information, please go to LocalShops1.com

We're finalists!!!!!!!

So a couple of weeks ago, we were reading Creative Tampa Bay's e-newsletter and came across an interesting contest: Present the Perfect Pitch, win a $250,000 ad campaign.

Malcolm Out Loud, a Tampa-based marketing and ad agency, was offering two $250,000 ad campaigns to two companies with the best marketing pitch. The catch? It cost $300 to enter. If we did it by the following Monday. After that, it cost $500 to enter. Everyone who entered would get $3,000 in ads.

We talked it over. "Scam!" "No way!" "Not for real!" "Waste of money!"

... But a $3,000 ad package could help us.

... If we wait and decide to enter later, it costs $200 more.

... and what if we won?!?!!?

We went for it. Yes, it was risky, but we did a little background checking first. We called the media partners they had listed, and confirmed the contest was for real. We called the marketing agency and asked lots of questions.

The application was five questions, about 250 words each, if I recall correctly. They wanted to know what our business was all about, and, as you all know, we LOVE talking about LocalShops1, so we had no trouble with that.

We submitted the entry, paid through PayPal. And then we panicked. What if just wasted $300? In the grand scheme of things, $300 isn't a lot. But it's money we could have used elsewhere, or, better yet, saved.

Yesterday we got a call, telling us we're among the 10 finalists. Which means we get to present LocalShops1, to a panel of judges and an entire audience, at Raymond James stadium next Thursday evening.

No video, no audio. Just us, talking about what we love.

Please wish us luck. And if you have any suggestions, let us know in the next few days. E-mail us through LocalShops1.com.

Thanks. We're all in this together, right?

Ester

Support your neighbors. Shop locally.

Here is a blog I wrote for Creative Tampa Bay, a very cool Tampa-based group that's all about working together to make Tampa Bay even cooler than it already is!


Support your neighbors. Shop locally.
By Ester Venouziou, LocalShops1.com founder

I love to shop. I grew up in Brazil, and some of my favorite memories have to do with shopping, mostly with my grandmother and my sister, on Saturday mornings.

We’d go to the produce market, chat with the vendors as we picked up fruits and veggies. Then it was off to a meat market, or to the fish guy. Along the way we usually stopped at the newsstand, where my grandmother picked up the daily paper and maybe a magazine or two, and, if my sister and I had had a good week, we ’d be rewarded with some comic books.

Eventually we’d end up at my parents’ shop: Importadora Jenny, a fabric store named after my mom. I was about 8 or 9 then, and I remember sitting behind the counter, helping wrap up purchases, talking with the customers.

We moved to New Jersey when I was 12, and that all changed.

For the next 15 years or so, shopping meant going to the mall or to the big-box stores. I remember, when I lived in Jacksonville in the mid-1990s every Tuesday was my shopping day. Winn-Dixie and Target and Stein Mart were the regular stops. And then there was the mall. There were two pretty close to where I lived, and I’d go to one one week, the other the next. I don’t know why I even bothered to alternate, because they both had pretty much the same stores. Every week, I’d come home with bags full of things I didn’t need, things I couldn’t afford. What was in those bags I can’t remember. All I know is that shopping had stopped being fun.

• • •

There are many reasons to shop at locally owned, independent places. Studies show that money spent locally, at an indie, is more likely to stay local. On a typical November shopping day, the Tampa Independence Business Alliance reports, if all taxable purchases in Hillsborough County were made at locally owned independent businesses instead of national chains, it wo uld make a $28 million dollar difference to the local economy.

Economics aside, supporting the independents also helps preserve the businesses that link us to the past, the businesses that ensure our communities will retain charm and character to the future.

And shopping at independents is just a lot more fun.

• • •

We launched LocalShops1.com in August 2008. We are a small, grassroots group, dedicate to helping promote independent businesses. It’s always free to browse, free to join and free to get listed.

We’re not saying, never shop at the chains or franchises. We’re simply saying, think before you shop. There are times when shopping at those places makes sense, and yes, you might run into us at Publix or Target sometimes.

We just want to make it easier for people to find their options, so they don’t automatically default to the big-box stores or the malls.

Our goal is to build a network of indie business owners and indie-minded shoppers, and we’re doing that through our Web site, of course, but also by co-hosting neighborhood parties/fundraisers and marketing/business seminars. Former radio jock-turned comedian Pat Largo has been an integral part in all this, as our official spokesman and party host.

We believe in working together with the media, as well as other business and neighborhood groups, to help our local businesses thrive. We re all in this together.