Rules to follow when using Social Media Marketing By Ashley Schultz It can be scary and challenging when entering the world of “Social Media” marketing for the 1st time! Success with social media and content marketing requires less talking and more listening. Read your target audience’s online content and join discussions to learn what’s important to them. Then you create content and spark conversations that encourage them to focus and purchase from your brand. Quality over quantity. It’s better to have a few thousand connections who read, share and talk about your content with their own audiences than millions of connections who disappear after connecting with you the first time. You also have to be patient, it won’t happen overnight, you have to be consistent! Don’t give up! Take advantage of platforms such as Hootsuite, which place all your social media sites in one place. They also allow you to schedule posts for the future on all sites and determine the best time to reach your target audience. Find those that promote your brand, also known as influencers. Develop relationships with them so that they can further market your product. It is best to not bombard your followers with posts every couple hours, it is better to develop interesting and engaging content and just post once or twice a day. Always acknowledge anyone that reaches out to you, never ignore a message or a comment posted on your page. This person could be critical in developing a successful social media marketing initiative! Finally, you can’t expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don’t do the same for them. So, a portion of the time you spend on social media should be focused on sharing and talking about content published by others, especially those that are…
By Bob Tagert Well, we have made it to the last month of summer and the air temps are beginning to cool off as the temperature of the country continues to rise. Maybe fall and winter can become a cooling off period. This month’s Road Trip is a blast that takes you to a museum that we all helped build…the Baltimore Museum of Industry. The watering holes nearby are pretty awesome too! You will have to check out Little Havana and the Tiki Barge! If your artistic side is looking for an adventure, check out the Solomons Plein Air Festival piece in the Arts & Entertainment section. Speaking of Solomons, Maryland, dolphins were sighted just last week in the Patuxent River. Read about “Dolphins in Our Midst” in From the Bay. I have been fortunate enough over the past two years to see these beautiful animals in the river and watch them swim alongside as I sailed. With the baseball playoffs right around the corner and football gearing up, we stopped into a renovated old favorite…Ramparts Tavern & Grill for the September Dining Out. If you are looking to watch a game and have some good eats and drinks, this is the place. Lori Welch Brown addresses how labels affect us over the course of our lives in her Open Space column. In light of the events that took place last month in Charlottesville, this is a welcome piece. The subject of our Business Profile opted out of being written about due to a conflict they are having with the “City”. We respect their wishes and have filled that space with a feature about the history behind Labor Day. This falls right in line with the piece about the Museum. I think you will learn some interesting facts about how…
By Bob Tagert Linda K. Glover- It ain’t about the dress. I have said it numerous times, “Ever since we started writing about personalities thirty years ago, I am continually amazed how many interesting folks we have met”. We have met them everywhere but, like this month, our profile is about another person we met at Landini Brothers restaurant. Do not fall for first impressions, because there is much more to Linda K. Glover than meets the eye. A soft spoken, strikingly professional woman does not reveal her life of living and working in a man’s world. The daughter of an Air Force officer and English war-bride Mother, Glover has lived in many places. Her first school was in London, England. From there the family moved to Frankfurt, Germany where she attended an American military school, Demarest, New Jersey; Belleville, Illinois; and finally Andrews Air Force base in Prince Georges County. It was here, while still in her teens (17), Glover began doing lab work for the Naval Oceanographic Office, where she worked on and off all through college. She attended Duke University where she graduated in 1970 with a degree in chemistry. The ongoing debate at the time on seafloor spreading, continental drift and plate tectonics prompted her to take graduate courses in marine geology and enter that field. During her time at the NAVOCEANO labs, Glover improved lab techniques, designed the shipboard labs to move lab work to sea, and went to sea in 1968 to train the guys on how to do it. For seven years after college, Glover worked at the Navy research lab in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland. Fifty years ago I would ride my motorcycle past this facility on the cliffs of the Chesapeake, and I often wondered what was behind those 12-…
By Lani Gering Ramparts Tavern & Grill Football Fare – Something for Everyone! We have to start this column out with a bit of a true confession….it has been a “while” since either one of us has been in Ramparts to drink or dine. In fact it has been well over a year – I believe they still allowed smoking! One of us is there every month dropping off the current issue but are always double parked and in a hurry so no time to patronize the place. We are also creatures of habit and tend to stay closer to the heart of Old Town so heading to Fairlington isn’t in our wheelhouse. Well….that is going to change. Ramparts was originally called The Cole Bin and has been around for almost 40 years. In 1978 it was renamed and quickly became a real neighborhood “watering hole”. During the 80’s it grew into more of a pub and a grill serving good bar food to the residents of the popular Fairlington area of Alexandria. A little over a year ago, proprietor Stephen Mann and his partners decided that it needed a face lift and boy did they ever do a good job! Gone are the dingy dark brick and smoke soaked furnishings on the Tavern side and the non-descript feel in the Grill area. The place now sports dark hardwood floors, white washed brick walls and soft leather seating on both sides. The new fixtures and wall art are a nice touch as well. There are 4 rooms including the bar and dining room on the Grill side, the pub on the Tavern side and the Fairlington Room which is a private dining space for up to 30. Let’s talk about the food and beverage. We aren’t going to regurgitate the…
By Bob Tagert Baltimore Museum of Industry – Join the Industrial Evolution! We were invited to attend the Distillery Showcase presented by the Maryland Distillers Guild on June 25th. We had tickets to see the Steve Miller Band and Peter Frampton perform at the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons that Sunday so we decided to make a two- day excursion…Saturday at the Museum and Sunday in Solomons Maryland. As it turned out, I misread the information. The Distillery Showcase was also on Sunday. The embarrassment grew as we reported to the museum receptionist that we were there to taste and write about whiskey. All was not lost. We had discovered the Baltimore Museum of Industry by mistake. Last month we went back to the Museum as our September Road Trip. What a cool place! Even though we who live in the Washington D.C. area have access to the greatest museums in the world, this one about industry in Maryland brings the experience so much closer to our lives. I have heard of these names. I use Maryland inventions like Sweetheart straws every day. I remember some of these exhibits from when I was a boy. I can’t remember a World War I tank, but I do remember the AM radio in my dad’s car. I knew about the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, America’s first railroad. I had heard of Stieff Silver, Crown Cork and Seal Company and Black & Decker, and it is all here. Out on the Patapsco River resting along side her dock is the Baltimore, a preserved steam-powered tugboat, built in 1906 by the Skinner Shipbuilding Company of Baltimore. She is the oldest operating steam tugboat in the United States. The Baltimore was built and operated as a harbor inspection tug capable of acting as…
By Lani Gering Summertime is Winding Down… The month of September hosts the final days of summer and the beginning of fall. Here in the Harbor that means that some of the events that make this a fun place to live and visit cease only to make way for upcoming holiday happenings. The Thursday “Date Night” and the Sunday “Family Night” movie screenings end this month along with the Friday Night Fun Night activities and the Sunset Concert Series. I celebrated 6 years of living here in the Harbor last month and I have to admit that I probably haven’t taken advantage of as many of the free events that have taken place over the years that I should have, but this summer has been different. My schedule has been such that I have spent several Friday evenings having some fun on the plaza with old friends and making new ones and have watched my fair share of movies on the big screen on both Thursdays and Sundays. I’ve only made it to two Sunset Concerts since they are on Saturday and it is a rare occasion that I am home on a Saturday during the summer – sailing on the Bay and the Pax River get in the way on most weekends. I am hoping that this column will get you revved up for joining in on some of the last of the summer fun. Unless you plan to get to the Plaza early to score a seat in one of the Adirondack chairs available or don’t mind sitting on one of the several granite benches, you might want to bring a cushion for the benches, a camping chair or a nice blanket to sit on during the movies. The “astro-turf” that compiles the “lawn” does have a padding…
The History of Labor Day Labor Day: What it means. Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country. Labor Day Legislation Through the years the nation gave increasing emphasis to Labor Day. The first governmental recognition came through municipal ordinances passed during 1885 and 1886. From these, a movement developed to secure state legislation. The first state bill was introduced into the New York legislature, but the first to become law was passed by Oregon on February 21, 1887. During the year four more states — Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York — created the Labor Day holiday by legislative enactment. By the end of the decade Connecticut, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania had followed suit. By 1894, 23 other states had adopted the holiday in honor of workers, and on June 28 of that year, Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each year a legal holiday in the District of Columbia and the territories. Founder of Labor Day More than 100 years after the first Labor Day observance, there is still some doubt as to who first proposed the holiday for workers. Some records show that Peter J. McGuire, general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a cofounder of the American Federation of Labor, was first in suggesting a day to honor those “who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold.” But Peter McGuire’s place in Labor Day history has not gone unchallenged. Many believe that Matthew Maguire, a machinist, not Peter McGuire, founded the holiday. Recent…
The Plaza is a Busy Place! FREE FITNESS CLASSES On the Plaza Through October Participate in a free fitness classes on the Plaza brought to you by No Excuse Workout. All classes run from 7-8 pm except Saturday morning yoga that runs from 10-11 am. Mondays – CardioHIT Tuesdays – Kickboxing Wednesdays – Zumba Saturdays – Yoga (Please refer to National Harbor’s Facebook page for any weather related cancellations.) MOVIES ON THE POTOMAC On the Big Screen The Plaza Nothing says summer like an evening under the stars—and there’s no better way to enjoy the season than a date night at National Harbor. Join us on the Plaza every Thursday night – Date Night Style – and Sundays – Family Night Style! Please note that movies will begin at 6 pm on Sundays and 7 pm on Thursdays and will be shown once, so end times may vary with each movie. Double Features start at 4 pm. A schedule of movies to be shown can be viewed below. Date Night Screenings: 7th – Footloose 14th – Sleepless in Seattle 21st – Back to the Future 28th – Beauty and the Beast (2017) Family Night Screenings: 3rd – DOUBLE FEATURE: Cinderella (1997) & Cinderella (1950) 10th – The Little Mermaid 17th – Mulan 24th – Beauty and the Beast (1991) SUMMER FRIDAYS ARE A BIG HIT! Through the 29th 4 pm- 8 pm Start your weekend right with Summer Fridays at National Harbor! Play Corn hole, Connect Four, Giant Jenga, hula hoop, hopscotch, and more with family and friends. Enjoy performances by Bobby McKey’s, giveaways, and listen to the DJ spin your favorite summer jams. And of course, joining us means you get front row seats to the…
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Generation Wealth Miriam R. Kramer “Everyone wants to be rich. If they can’t be rich, the next best thing is to feel rich—and if they don’t want to feel rich, then they’re probably dead.” So says David Siegel, the time-share billionaire who continues to build a house planned to be the biggest in America, a mansion modeled on Versailles near Orlando. He is not wrong. In the photo book Generation Wealth, the author and photographer Lauren Greenfield has subtly and effectively documented the American dream of wealth and fame, and how it has spread globally through interconnected financial systems, exported pop culture, social media, and increased disparity between the uber-wealthy one percent and ordinary people. “Greed is good,” the motto of the Reagan-era Wall Street movie character Gordon Gekko, has proved prophetic. Greenfield pictures countries as diverse as the United Arab Emirates, Russia, and China, which have also become obsessed with luxury, accumulation, and self-image. They too value the wealth, fame, status, and celebrity they see on television, in movies, and on social media as the keys to the best, most fulfilling life. Greenfield has synthesized carefully curated photos taken over twenty-five years of globe-trotting and interviewing. Her subjects include Chinese millionaires going to finishing school to learn how to act wealthy, Russians making up for years of communism with conspicuous consumption, teenagers getting plastic surgery and attending $90,000 bat mitzvahs in Beverly Hills, bling-studded American rappers collecting status sneakers, reality TV stars like the Kardashians serving as role models, and millionaires “making it rain” in Las Vegas and Atlanta strip clubs. Her weighty, beautiful coffee table tome comes purposefully printed with a luxurious gold cover, flaunting its own riches while thoughtfully and subtly picturing her subjects. Albeit a lovely book with compelling photos, its value runs far…
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