By Dan Berard, Sustainable Business Conference Director

     The First Annual Sustainable Business Conference has a new website nearing completion (www.sustainableseminole.com) and it is ready for viewing. Attendees and exhibitors soon will be able to register online and pay online. The website will host profiles of each attendee and exhibitor, much the same as our Chamber website. Local businesses also will be able to advertise on this website to support the conference and advertise their business.

    An existing Chamber member has been formerly chosen as the host hotel for conference visitors and the site of our Friday evening reception. The beautiful Holiday Inn & Suites Harbourside was chosen as our hotel partner to provide all the amenities necessary to make our visitors comfortable. For the conference itself, we have completed the detailed planning for the conference sessions, covering four major tracks: energy, sustainable building design, water / waste water and sustainable policies, practices and regulations.

    The marketing phase of this project will feature a monthly online newsletter, marketing assistance from our Chamber partner KissMarketing as internet marketing agent, and a social media initiative to interact with our community, as well as the professionals and organizations invited to this conference. Our target audience includes businesses, licensed professionals and municipal/county executives with interest in improving their skills and obtaining continuing education credits from St. Petersburg College Seminole Campus.

   The conference will be presented in the Digital Auditorium (or  “Digitorium”), at the St. Petersburg College Seminole Campus, which is a state-of-the-art conference facility with full support for technologically/media rich presentations. The surrounding classrooms will support simultaneous presentations covering the four tracks. The expo will feature related exhibits in the Library Annex -Conference Center. Our local businesses will be given the opportunity to visit the expo area to meet the expert vendors and service providers.

   This major initiative supported by the Chamber, City, College and County also will need community support to be a successful annual event. These five C’s will establish the Greater Seminole Area as a regional center for sustainability education and continue to attract visitors and students to our area.

WEBSITE

   In other news, our Chamber website is undergoing a facelift in response to a number of recent workshops on the subject. Ripcord Media Solutions, previously Green Leaves Web Design, is converting to a new template, which will support a number of business objectives. First of all, this template should be faster and support better usability making it easier to find things. We also want to better support the submission of articles from members and the fast emerging social media communications. We encourage you to update your directory profile on the website membership directory. If you need assistance with this, please call Gretchen at the Chamber office at 392-3245.

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