Richmond’s call girls and their customers are no longer using Craigslist as a virtual bulletin board to arrange business. The popular website has a new warning, “Human trafficking and exploitations of minors are not tolerated – any suspected activity will be reported to law enforcement.” Postings about intimate nights for sale are getting flagged and… Read more »
Media/Marketing/Advertising
Locked and loaded (with a staple gun and flyers)
While waiting for my coffee one morning at the Starbucks in the Fan, I noticed a bulletin board on the wall with a handful of posters and flyers hung up for different events. A few rough drafts later BizSense had an 8×10 pull-tab flyer (you know, the ones where you tear the little piece of… Read more »
Open the press release floodgates
You’re about to read a sentence no newspaper/magazine has ever written. Please send us your press releases. That’s not a typo. We’re not off our meds. We just launched a local PR Newswire. Now Richmond businesses can post news about themselves on the BizSense’s Rich Wire. Big companies already pay to run their press releases… Read more »
The business media can build, and it can destroy
The media sword can cut both ways. In May I wrote about how Richmond-based job board Snagajob.com owes much of its success to its media strategy, and the mainstream media that made such a strategy possible. The company positioned founder and President Sean Boyer as an expert on hourly jobs (wouldn’t an expert on hourly… Read more »
FBI nabs Virginia movie uploader
A Virginia man is facing 10 years in prison for posting movies online. His website once released the latest Star Wars movie six hours before it hit theaters nationwide. Investigations by the FBI, including the field office in Richmond, VA, have led to the conviction of Daniel Dove, 26, on counts of conspiracy and felony… Read more »
Local scrap-booking company to appear in Martha Stewart Living
Do a Google search for Tabitha Geary and 37,900 hits come back. After clicking through eight pages worth of links and being confronted time and time again by the same face, it seems that there is no other Tabitha Geary than the Richmonder who owns a scrap-booking company that bears her name. And now Geary’s… Read more »
Roll the cameras: Fox 35 killing cats
Talk about a cat fight. When local TV station WRLH Fox 35 hired an exterminator to kill feral cats in a back lot of its building, the local SPCA got wind and unleashed a save-the-kittens firestorm. Now the station is dealing with a far larger problem than a few alley cats: a PR snafu that… Read more »
Media General CEO predicts mergers
Media General CEO Marshall Morton says major American newspapers will have to join forces in order to stay alive. “There’s got to be some assimilation, I would guess that rather than bankruptcies, you’d see some combinations,” he says in a story that appeared in Monday’s NY Times. Ad revenue at newspapers across the country is… Read more »
Networking online … helpful or just a passing fad?
The professional networking site LinkedIn just raised $53 million in capital, which pegs the company’s valuation at around $1 billion. Technology analysts are wondering if that’s a tad high. How much social networking sites can extract from advertisers and subscribers, after all?
$25 gas card for out-of-town visitors
Drive to Richmond. Stay in a hotel for two nights. Get a $25 gas card. That’s the pitch of an ad currently running in Roanoke, Washington D.C. and Hampton Roads. The Richmond Metropolitan Convention & Visitor’s Bureau, which promotes the Richmond region as a tourist destination, is paying for the spots. The ads link to… Read more »