First published on Mission Local
Upstart # 1 Sales!
January 12, 2015 2:34 pm
I’ve just survived my first week as a saleswoman—urging local businesses to buy memberships in Mission Local and promoting ML with readers, too.
It hasn’t been pretty.
All my life I’ve avoided my family’s business. And now, here I am, in business and, of all things, selling. If my dad were alive, he’d be having a good laugh.
Quick background: I started Mission Local as a project at the UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism where I am a full professor, where I hold an endowed chair. But my real passion for the past six years has been this site. So when the school announced last year that it would stop year-round funding Mission Local (as well as the other hyper-local news sites), I decided to spin it off. READ MORE
Upstart # 2, Feeling the Love (or Not)
Posted January 19, 2015 10:45 amThere was big news last week: Mission Local is getting a hotdog named after it next month! If customers order the Mission Local hotdog only 360 times, Los Shucos, the Guatemalan hot dog café on 22nd Street will buy a $360 Mission Local business membership.
I’m now calling this marketing maneuver the Shucos move because it’s so damn clever – not an out-and-out rejection of my sales pitch, but a way to keep the conversation going and, not incidentally, boost its own sales. (For those of you...Read more