Blog o' RAMA

Golisano Shows His Charitable Side at RAMA Event

Hello everyone,

To those of you who weren't there, you won't believe what happened at our event today yesterday. As you know, RAMA chooses a charity for each event, and we donate $1 for every person who attends.  Our charity for this event was Rotary Camp Onseyawa.

Well, we were one-upped in a big way by our presenter,Tom Golisano. He raised $3,000 auctioning off an autographed Ryan Miller jersey, and $5,000 by offering a game and dinner for 8 people in his personal suite at a Sabres game. There were 2 representatives from the charity at the event, and they were ecstatic!

Tom's talk was great. I loved the way he used his business savvy to make the changes needed to bring the franchise around, and it is a great example of how to turn a business around.

Thanks to everyone who worked on this event to bring it to fruition. I am very proud of how RAMA was represented today.

Reflecting on Super Marketing Hero: B. Thomas Golisano

Today, we had the pleasure of hosting B. Thomas Golisano, owner of the Sabres and founder of Paychex, Inc., as a Super Marketing Hero. The topic was "Reinvigorating the Sabres Brand." His presentation was outstanding (for both the marketers and all of the hockey fans in the audience)!

The focus of the presentation was on the Sabres' success story. Back in 2003 when Golisano purchased the Sabres, the team was bankrupt.

Golisano shared with us the strategies and tactics he used to turnaround his NHL team and create a profitable business. He claimed that these strategies are no secret and are applied to his billion-dollar payroll processing business, Paychex, Inc.

• You must have a quality product and offer it at a quality (fair) price.
• The team (or business) cannot lose money. Many other NHL owners are willing to take any measure that would ensure a winning season, even if it includes losing money.
• Golisano said that his management watches the expenses very closely. If cutting payroll and losing key players prevents the Sabres from losing money, than that is what he will do.

In addition to taking a closer look at improving parking, traffic flow, food services, and game presentation, Golisano talked to us about the ticket pricing strategy that he implemented. It was the first time in NHL history that a team adopted a variable pricing strategy based on ticket demand. Tickets are priced higher for the more popular games, and priced lower for the ones that do not fill the arena.

The Sabres fans in the audience were thrilled to find hockey pucks at their table that Golisano later autographed. 

eBusiness Association and RAMA present: Luke Wroblewski

eBusiness association and RAMA are proud to present:
Designing for Web 2.0 with principal/founder of LukeW Interface Designs, Senior Designer with Yahoo! and former Lead Designer at ebay: Luke Wroblewski.

Our thanks to our Corporate and Media Sponsors:
Channel 13 WHAM, IBM and itx.

 

DATE: Friday, December 7, 2007

9:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.
at the RIT Inn and Conference
Henrietta NY 14586

Your $99.00 includes workshop, lunch and Luke's book Site Seeing

For more information please click to the eBusiness Association site here. Register here.

Welcome new RAMA Members!

RAMA (Rochester Chapter, American Marketing Association), welcomes our new members for October.  We are very fortunate to have a strong professional and student membership base that is growing.  If you are not a member, why not?  You can join AMA and RAMA on the web.

Welcome to our new Professional members:
Joan Aiello
Alice Witherow
Jeannine Rossignol
Laurie Dwyer
Julia Price

Welcome to our new Student members:
William Brosi
Nicholas Angeline
David Koster
Revay Wilson
Brian Agro

If you want to learn more about membership in RAMA please email Barb Cote who can provide more information.

Seeking Opinions on Facebook's New Ad Platform

Social Networking site Facebook unveiled its new advertising platform earlier this week at a posh event they held in New York City. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said "The next 100 years starts today, and it's going to be different," comparing his new platform to a once-in-a-century change for our industry.

If you're not up-to-speed on what it's all about, you're not the only one. It's pretty complicated and it will take some time to see if this really is the innovation of the century as he claims it is. I wrote a post yesterday in my blog, Donna's Promo Talk, that describes the new platforms and gives some links to other articles written about it. So take a look.

There has been quite a bit of conversation going on in the blogosphere regarding Facebook's  announcement that include many different opinions...some positive, some negative. So, I'd like to get the conversation going here and see what some of our RAMA members think of it all. Do you think it's going to change marketing as we know it now?