‘Corporate citizenship’ is a common buzzword these days. It boils down to being a positive influence on your community. The best part is that it also serves as a business marketing tactic for your brand. It’s a win for everyone.

Often, business are key social hubs for local communities. Therefore they are ideally placed to play a role in helping local people and causes. For example, your coffee shop can:

• Offer a room or area for local groups to meet.
• Donate food and drink to local shelters and other people in need.
• Sponsor charity events and supply prizes for raffles and the like.
• Collect money for local causes or organize donation drives.
• Look for the biggest employers near you and work with them to provide an exemplary lunch offer.

Ensure the packaging you use is sustainable and up for the job. The idea here is that your business is aligned with the community service it provides.

The oldest play in the business marketing playbook is investing in advertising. Advertising all that’s good about your venue doesn’t always need to cost a lot of money. Making yourself known in the community and beyond cements your business in the scene.

Events that are on-brand and newsworthy can bring information about your venue to a new audience. Stories could involve:

• Achievements by your staff or customers (be it sporting, educational or otherwise).
• An extravagant party you’ve thrown for a local event.
• An amusing seasonal competition that has captured the public’s imagination.
• A talk by a famous (or not-so-famous) speaker in your venue.

Harness the power of social media to help with your advertising. Utilize on-brand hashtags, and be sure to use location tags. There are an astounding number of people that use social media. Since they are already online, market your brand so your audience naturally comes across your posts.

If you know the direction your business is going, you can add value quicker. Wondering how? An excellent business marketing plan we briefly mentioned is to work with other businesses. Again, don’t just throw anything at it. What kind of ‘bonus features’ align most with your branding and your biggest demographics? Some ideas include:

• Selling local crafts.
• A vintage or locally-made fashion market.
• A pop-up book and art store.
• A permanent counter selling locally-produced groceries.
• Working with Amazon, or another delivery service, to provide lockers for delivered goods.
• A seasonal gift market.

Of course, you don’t have to outsource these features of your business. Doing it in-house could be profitable. But it could also take significant time out of your day to stay on top of core operations.

Founded in 1994 by Web-surfing Stanford University grad students, Yahoo! grew from a tiny

upstart surrounded by Silicon Valley heavy weights to a powerful force in Internet media.

Yahoo! worked hard to be more than just a search engine. The company proudly proclaims it

is “The only place anyone needs to go to find anything, communicate with anyone, or buy

anything.” Its range of services includes e-mail, news, weather, music, photos, games, shopping,

auctions, and travel. A large percentage of revenues comes from advertising, but the company also

profits from subscription services such as online personal ads, premium e-mail, and small-business services.

Although Yahoo! strives to achieve a competitive advantage over rival Google with its vast array of original content, Google’s ascension to the runaway leader in search, e-mail, and related services has made it a darling with advertisers. Yahoo!’s acquisition of photo-sharing service Flickr, social bookmark manager Del.icio.us, and online video editing site Jump cut strengthened its capabilities. Yahoo! has also continued to grow globally in Europe and Asia, helped in part by the acquisition of Kel koo, a European comparison shopping site, for $579 million, and of 46 percent of Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce company, for $1 billion in cash. Discussions with Microsoft about a possible merger culminated in a 10-year deal in June 2009 that gave Microsoft full access to the Yahoo!

search engine, to be used in future Microsoft projects for its own search engine, Bing. CEO Carol Bartz faced many questions, however, about how Yahoo! should best move forward.