One of our favorite sites to search for inspiration is StumbleUpon. This week we came across Save on Crafts, a premier website for catering, special event planners, and wedding planners for all types of events. They have every supply you might ever need for creating your desired ambiance & decor for your upcoming soiree.

Their incredible inventory includes floralytes, fiberoptics, lights, stemware, preserved flowers, freeze dried petals, eco-friendly confetti and all types of decorations. You can also find feathers, millinery, baskets, vase lights, natural touch flowers, crystal trees, wishing trees, apothecary jars, guest registry books, paper crafts, floral supplies, vases and other party supplies.

If you are looking to save some cash, this site can help reduced your costs from 20-50% by purchasing the raw materials. They also have a live chat system on the site to help you find the perfect piece to your puzzle. There is a Projects and Inspiration link to use for even more creative ideas, from “How-To’s” to “What’s Hot” and “Trending now.” Here at ABCey Events we love using the best materials to create the best decor for that extra special touch. We hope you love this site as much as we do. What DIY projects will you be attempting now that you’ve found Save on Crafts?

At some point or another, every business experiences down time.  And I don’t mean R&R, I mean a slump.  A sales slump.  Sometimes slumps can be prevented, but other times, when the market is plainly not in your favor, all you can really do is roll with the punches to stay afloat.  An article on Entrepreneur.com suggests several ways to stay alive when the odds are against you.

1. Cut Other Spending:  Spend a little less cash by spending a bit of time reviewing your budget.  Take note of items that you are overstocked in, like office supplies or furniture.  Make the necessary cuts and research ways to get necessary items at a bargain.  Saving on the little things is where it counts most.

2. Manage Cash Flow: Make sure that all invoices are being paid on time.  This will ensure that your money is being accounted for and you are keeping an accurate record of your funds.

3. Ramp Up Marketing: With the aid of the internet, there are infinite ways to market yourself for cheap or free, such as regular Twitter and Facebook posts and contests.  Also, reaching out to customers by running ads in local periodicals is a good way to keep spending to a minimum while also getting the message out about how great your company is.

4. Team Up: It is likely that if you are experiencing hard times, other companies are as well.  Do a little research and find out which companies in your area might want to team up with yours to host low-cost promotional events.  This will be good, as not only will you most certainly garner more positive attention for your business, you will also establish a professional bond with the other companies involved.

The event planning industry has many ups and downs, but we think these are some good tips for remaining on the upturn.  What are some ways your company stays afloat in turbulent waters?

To get the rest of the tips, click here!

There are many ways to use the Internet to market your business, and one popular and effective method today is with an online press release. The Internet has provided a simpler and more efficient way to publish a press release in comparison to the lengthy process of the traditional printed method, and there are various benefits of distributing pres releases online. To start, it can be circulated much faster, it also can provide SEO value to other websites, it is much easier to find, read and pass along, it is a more cost effective method, and it has a larger reach. But as is with any widely used trend, it is important to have your product stand out and be noticed. The following tips will be helpful to creating a press release that will provide your website with the most value for search engine exposure and branding.

1. Make it Newsworthy. Do not release a press release just to get something out there, wait until you have interesting and newsworthy information to communicate.
2. Use Keywords. Use them strategically, and make it sound natural.
3. Use Anchor Text Links. By linking to websites you are increasing the probability that someone will click on your link and helping the search engines realize what the link that is pointing to your website is about.
4. Include Media. Text is more interesting when it is broken up with visually stimulating pictures. And you can use media as a tool of communication and interaction.
5. Write Professionally. There are 3 basic guidelines to producing a well-written press release: 1) always write in 3^rd person, 2) refrain from using industry jargon that some readers may not understand, and 3) reference reputable sources if you are going to include data, it maximizes the credibility of your statements.

If you have not yet attempted using press releases as a way to marketing your business, or if you find that yours are not standing out, we hope that these tips help you accomplish this. You can read the full article here. We at ABCey are ready to try this approach! If you have used online press releases in your marketing strategy, have you found this to be a successful tool? Do you have any other tips for the rest of us?

How do you know when you’ve found a good client?  Or more importantly, how do you know what to look for in a client?  Peter Drucker, a writer on all things business, says, “The result of a business is a satisfied customer.”  In order to have great results when it comes to identifying a good customer right off the bat, one needs to establish a set of standards by which to measure potential clients.  From that point, it will be easier to spot which are going to be beneficial to both your business and the client, and weed out the ones whowill not deliver good results.  An article on smashingmagazine.com tells us how to successfully build that criteria.

Crafting Your Principles. First, you must decide who your ideal customer is.  To make that decision, consider these aspects: Size; Budget; Payment Schedule; Technical Knowledge; Project Dynamics; Length of Relationship; Personality Fit.  Deciding what is right for your company within these principles will be the first step in knowing who your target clientele is.

Qualification is Crucial. Making a spreadsheet of your principles and the rankings of clients is a good way to see everything at once.  It’s also good to do comparisons between current and past projects.

Self-Qualification. “Now that you know what matters most in your relationships with customers, you can signal that on your website, filtering customers who you would never want to work with.”

Never Too Late To Say Goodbye.  You should love what you do, and if a particular project is producing negative reactions for you, here are five reasons why you should get rid of a customer: The customer is abusive; You don’t get paid on time; You get phone calls at nights or on weekends, even though you insisted otherwise; The scope of the project perpetually increases, but the customer refuses to increase the budget; The customer doesn’t respect you professionally and ignores your recommendations.

In the event planning industry, we are often challenged with a customer who falls under one or more of the aforementioned issues.  This is most likely because a client has hired you to plan an event for them, meaning they may have unclear or mixed ideas about what the event should entail because they are not the professional.  That is why they hired you.  It is important for you, the professional, to be treated as such and not undermined by the customer.  Finding the right kind of client or customer is sometimes difficult, but once you define your template and find a method that works for your business, you will be farther up on the path of success!

The full article can be read here!

An important piece of a company’s marketing strategy is an effective logo, but it’s not always that easy to come up with an image that an audience will immediately connect to. If successful, a company’s logo can become iconic, such as Twitter’s blue bird, or at least make a customer interested enough to take a harder and longer look at your company. As Mickiewicz states in an article from Entrepreneur.com, a good logo is important because it “is something that people recognize instantly and relate to.” Having said this, here are 6 valuable tips the article stresses on how to achieve your visually pleasing, successful logo:

Don’t worry about conveying exactly what the company does. While it can relate to the purpose of the business, the logo should be able to adapt to the direction the company takes.

Size Matters. The size of the logo should change according to the medium its being used on, such as business cards versus ballpoint pens or the company’s website.

Proper ratios are vital. To avoid a logo that is too tall and skinny or wide and short, one should strive for what graphic designers call the “golden mean,” the ideal proportion for the logo, which usually is around the size of a typical business card.

Consider the target market. A logo is meant to appeal to customers and should be created with them in mind.

Seek instant impact. You want a logo that will immediately grab attention of the customer and will stand out against your competition. This can make the difference of keeping a customer at your business’s site.

Once it’s finalized, don’t change it. Once you create your properly proportioned, eye-grabbing logo, you should try to keep it as is. Brand recognition takes time.

To read the full article, click here.

As event planners, do you find that your logo has had a significant effect on the success of your business? Have you utilized any of these tools in the creation of your logo, or have you found any other methods that were helpful? ABCey found these tips helpful, and hopes you will too!

Apple Lovers Unite! Get ready as Apple is holding an invitation only event for reporters, bloggers, and analysts here in SF on September 1st at the Yerba Buena Center. If you were not among the elite chosen ones, you can tune in with the rest of us to hear about some of their exciting new products. This event is expected to be geared around Apple’s devices such as the iPod/Pad, Apple TV, and iPhone. There is also a small chance that we finally see the Verizon iPhone get announced. The rumor mill is running like crazy on this one, but it could be a bit too close to the Apple iPhone 4 launch to really see this product.

This is what we’re hoping to hear about:

• New iPod touch: With a back-facing camera for still images and videos and a front facing video camera for FaceTime video calls.
• Lower-cost iOS-based Apple TV – possibly at $99
• 99-cent TV show rentals
• 7 inch Ipad
  
• Cloud-based iTunes service

Which of these products will you be purchasing? And, more importantly can someone get us on the list?!

Depending on your answer, Fiverr may be the site for you! This new service provides a place for people to share things they’re willing to do for $5. The “gigs,” available to buy and sell, range from silly cards, a variety of lessons and instructions, medical advice, and songs and videos.

When the site first launched many people were skeptical it would succeed, but entrepreneurs Micha Kaufman and Shai Wininger realized that the mix of internet boredom and frugal consumers would create an ideal environment for their site to blossom. In essence, Fiverr is similar to sites like Etsy that connect buyers and sellers in a facilitated economy. For now Fiverr continues to grow and offer new gigs, because quite frankly, a lot of people out there know how to do some pretty cool stuff.

What would you do for $5? On that note, what would you buy for $5?

On Monday, Steve Jobs announced the phone that we’ve been waiting to hear about all year: The Iphone 4G! This phone is 10x more impressive than the last Iphone 3G and I can tell you that I am very impressed. I am definitely buying the new Iphone and can’t wait to get it in the palms of my hands, regardless of the long lines!. Enough talk, let’s see what the new Iphone has to offer. It comes with 100 new features, so take a look here at some of the best ones.

Features of the iPhone 4

9.3 mm thick (that’s 24% thinner than the iPhone 3GS)
Front-facing camera
Micro SIM
LED flash for the camera
A second microphone for sound cancellation
Integrated antennas
Glass on the front and the back
326 pixels per inch display
Powered by Apple’s A4 chipset

FaceTime brings video chat to the iphone 4G

This front-facing camera is going to be very useful to make video calling.
Here’s a video to see how this works:

A huge improvement is: A bigger battery. This means the Iphone can last a lot longer than before!!
7 hours of 3G talk time
6 hours of 3G browsing
10 hours of wifi browsing
10 hours of videos
40 hours of music
300 hours in standby

Also,check out the integrated antennas
If you look at the edge of the iPhone 4G, you can see 3 lines that are part of the structure of the device. With the iPhone 4G, Apple introduced something new.

Retina Display makes the iPhone 4G an HD device

Retina Display dramatically increases the pixel density by 4 in the same amount of space.The result is that you get far more precised display.

What do you think of the iPhone 4? I’m personally really excited about FaceTime…Are you impressed?

Every event planner in the industry, experienced or not will benefit from the newest Apple App “Mark On Call”. It’s designed to keep all those pieces of papers and stickies with numbers, figures, sample layouts, and tailored customer requests organized into a clean (paperless) software. Now all those files and notepads can be a thing of the past!

For the bargain price of $2.99 (download at www.iTunes.com), you can have:
*All of your units of measurement questions answered
*The ability to take pictures of actual rugs, painting, floral arrangements, fabric ideas, and table linens to directly show clients
*Customized room items for use in all your floor plans
*Creation of shopping lists, or write down last minute notes for a client.

And, get this…it’s easy to use!

BONUS: The reviews for customer service are superb. You are able to send emails write to the creator and get a response back within one hour! This app was created by event planners and interior designers so it’s not too far fetched. Watch the short clip above from the creator of the app, and hear more interesting tips and ideas!

Looking for new creative ideas or expert insight for the future of your event planning company? Well, look no further, the annual 2010 Event Solutions Conference & Trade-show will be hosted in Las Vegas with an estimated 5,000 attendees and more than 800 exhibit booths. The event is happening at the Las Vegas Convention Center and Paris Hotel during March 8-11, 2010.  Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman will discuss some of the current and upcoming trends in the travel, hospitality, and events industry.  Straying away from the Las Vegas reputation of the adult film industry, gadget geeks, and all the other characters that help hold true to the motto, “what happens in vegas, stays in vegas.” The city has been hit devastatingly by the current economic status, and all efforts are being made to turn around the city to get it back on its feet. The Mayor will be advocating the endless possibilities the city has for future events as well as the positive lights the city has.  With several other big names in the industry speaking about budgeting for your company, selecting a site, RFP’s, food & beverage, audio/visual technologies, and design & décor.

Over the course of the three day event, there are major event planners attending, speaking, and joining in on the new ideas to be spread around.  With several different seminars, meets and greets, and event boot camps to attend, everyone is guaranteed to walk away with new tips, ideas, and confidence for their business. Whether you are entering the business, have several years under your belt, or an old expert, everyone can learn something from this three day event. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re available, and if you’re serious about expanding your knowledge of the business from the experts!