Awesome, awesome, awesome! I’m so thrilled from the turnout! We had over 175 people pack the auditorium at the Burchfield Penney for our seminar on social media and small biz.  Thanks so much to everyone that came out and listened to me ramble on for an hour or so.  Hopefully you learned a lot!  Remember, the two most important things from the presentation: Build relationships and be yourself.

If you missed the presentation, shame on you! No, I’m just kidding! You can interact with the presentation and view it below. What are you waiting for? Check it out!

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Social Media & Your Business on Prezi

Shortly, we’ll post the videos from our interviews with Helen Min of Facebook, Emily Burns of Freed Maxick, Adam Wilson of Celebrate Buffalo, Becky Gandour of Elmwood Village Association [...]

We’re still geeking out here at Block Club. In the last week we’ve had interviews with MailChimp, Twitter, Facebook and now Mashable. Mashable is one of the coolest sites out there on the internets and is a must-read for anyone looking to have their finger on the pulse of the Web 2.0 world. We talked to Tamar Weinberg, a social media wiz-kid and author of The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web. She’s been at Mashable for 2.5 years on their business operations team, selling ads and handling community support. And as if that isn’t enough, she’s always hanging out on her blog, Techipedia, where she posts about social media.  Oh, and she also runs a social media consultancy. We love that she’s a self proclaimed “tech geek at heart.” Tamar was kind enough to take a few [...]

It’s been such an exciting few days here at Block Club.  We reached out to some really big players to help with our Social Media Presentation and got some really good ideas and assistance. Coleen Baik works on the experience design team at Twitter and answered a bunch of questions we had. Follow Coleen on Twitter @colbay. She’s awesome.

Block Club: It seems like everyone knows Twitter but so many people don’t understand it. Can you please explain it in the simplest terms? So, so basic that my 90 year-old grandmother would understand…

Coleen Baik: A “Tweet” is a message of 140 characters or fewer that you share with everyone.

Millions of Tweets are shared every day, and public tweets can be accessed by anyone, any time, anywhere in the world.

You are likely interested in only some of that information, so you personalize [...]

Block Club just hosted our first ever seminar on social media with the Small Business Development Center. The event took place at the new Burchfield Penny Art Center. Our goal was to get some local and national input on how small businesses/local businesses can leverage social media tools to help market themselves. Steve reached out to Ben Chestnut for an interview. Ben is the co-founder and CEO of MailChimp, the oh-so-cool (and my personal favorite) email marketing site.  MailChimp assists over 350,000 businesses with their email marketing efforts and recently MailChimp was rated a top social media tool by Mashable. I’ve always enjoyed MailChimp’s quirky attitude and rockin’ interface and was thrilled that Ben didn’t mind answering a few questions for us.  This is what Ben had to say:

Block Club: How can email marketing help small businesses market themselves?

Ben Chestnut: [...]

Millington Lockwood, WNY’s premier business interiors company, recently approached Block Club Creative to refresh their marketing materials in anticipation of their late-summer move. Mike Bonitatibus, owner of Millington Lockwood, wants his customers to know that they offer more than chairs, desks and other office furniture. Block Club created a new tag line to be used in all advertising and direct marketing. Millington Lockwood: More Than Furniture.

It sounds simple, right? Why over-complicate a simple message? Some ads still feature the iconic Herman Miller Aeron Chair, while others feature office environments created by Millington Lockwood and services like “move management.” Advertisements will start appearing in Business First soon, and postcards will be sent out via direct mail. Additionally, Block Club designed inserts for invoices and mail being sent to current customers as a way to cross-market and up-sell.

Twitter, the wildly popular micro-blogging site, recently announced that they are adding a new feature called the Twitter Business Center. Currently the service is in a testing phase and has only been rolled out to a handful of users. It’s expected that in the near future, this service will be available for all businesses on Twitter. So, what can you expect from this new feature and why is it so significant?

The biggest change is that businesses will be able to accept direct messages from individuals they’re not currently following. Translation: This will allow any Twitter user to send a private message to a company using the Twitter Business Center. This is significant for companies that prefer to use Twitter for customer service and outreach and for customers who prefer to use Twitter to communicate with companies and brands.

Once the [...]

Block Club friend and advertiser Zilly Rosen, owner of Zillycakes bakery in the Elmwood Village, is one sharp cookie. Not only are her cake and cupcake designs gaining a great deal of attention in the neighborhood, thanks in large part to her always-amazing display window (currently home to an unbelievable three-dimensional elephant cake), but she has also earned international kudos as well. News of President Obama’s Thursday trip to Buffalo got us thinking about Zilly’s impressive 1,200-cupcake mosaic of then-hopeful Barack Obama. Photos of the larger-than-life cupcake tribute made rounds on local news stations. Then national outlets like CNN and the Associated Press picked up the story. Even international outlets aired photos of her work! All because Zilly and a trusty publicist friend posted images of her work on photo-sharing site Flickr.com, which gave Zilly’s work an international platform. You [...]

Block Club Magazine kicks off its fourth year with a big bang! Issue 19, which will hit streets the first week of May, is our list of 50 Things We Love About Summer. If you thought May was too early to get a jump start on the beautiful and joyous summers we have here, you’d be wrong. We tell you our favorite places to catch a sunset, where you can watch a movie outside, what to do on a rainy day (hey, they happen!), how much fun it is to go shoeless for the season, and much, much, much more. If you enjoyed last year’s 50 Things We Love About WNY issue (#13, May/June 2009) you will love what we have up our sleeves this time.

From a design perspective, we’re getting a little nostalgic and using a visual theme of [...]

The Advertising Club of Buffalo hosted their annual ADDY awards last month at Kleinhans Music Hall. This year’s theme was “Why don’t I get it?” and was creatively designed by local advertising giant Gelia. The Buffalo ADDYs are part of a national competition that starts on a city-by-city basis. Winners advance to regionals and then nationals if they receive a gold on their projects.

We’re so happy to announce that Block Club Creative won two ADDYs for work we completed in 2009! We were awarded a silver award for Block Club Magazine’s 2009 Local Food Issue cover, which featured a commissioned painting by Alix Martin of Red Fish Studios in East Aurora. We earned a gold award for a series of brunch, lunch and dinner menus we created for Trattoria Aroma. Courtney Remm, our new graphic designer and recent graduate [...]

When Atlas Test Prep asked Block Club Creative to update their brand they were having several problems with their brand image, identity design and Web site. Atlas prepares high school students for ACT and SAT exams and not only has to appeal to teenagers but their parents and teachers as well.

The original Atlas Test Prep logo was dark, grainy and was difficult to reproduce (a big problem considering that most of the hand-outs and packets are produced on school copy machines). Additionally the brochure and registration information was outdated and the Web site couldn’t handle the traffic and needs of the growing company.

As Atlas started to expand outside of the New York State area into the Gulf Coast region, they were looking for a contemporary brand re-fresh, one that would last for years to come.

Atlas didn’t want an extreme departure [...]