The Business Finance Store Discusses How to Make Media Coverage Good for Business - PRWeb
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Santa Ana, CA (PRWEB) June 01, 2012
The jury of former Democratic presidential nominee John Edwards' case has been getting a lot of media coverage recently as they spent over 50 hours deliberating six counts based on allegations of illegal campaign contributions, falsified documents, conspiring to receive and conceal contributions, CNN reported. The coverage of this case has caught the attention of many media sources, and many probably wouldn’t want to be in Mr. Edwards' position simply because of the media coverage of his suspected misconduct. However, not all media coverage has to be negative coverage. In the recent blog post “Don't Be Scared of the Media,” The Business Finance Store discusses how small businesses can take a much more active role in their media management strategy.
Many are uneasy when it comes to media coverage in fear of negative media coverage. However, this does not have to be the case. There are many successful examples of media coverage that facilitates a positive in a business’ image. Read more about how to positively use media coverage at The Business Finance Store Blog.
The Business Finance Store is a business financing and consulting firm that offers customized Business Financial Solutions. Seasoned professionals offer assistance in a variety of financial solutions to help small businesses succeed such as:Business Financial Solutions, Legal Solutions, and Accounting Solutions.
The staff at The Business Finance Store understands that starting and growing a business is an exciting time. They keep it exciting by taking care of some of the most difficult aspects, by providing legal advice, helping with vital responsibilities like accounting & bookkeeping, and by obtaining business finance. They can quickly and easily guide entrepreneurs through many different complicated processes and put them on the path to success.
For 10 years The Business Finance Store has been helping startups and other small businesses legally structure their companies, find the right franchises, get the funding they need, and achieve the American Dream of owning their own successful business. Since expanding nationwide in 2007, they have helped thousands of companies and have funded over $60 Million in business credit lines, not including SBA loans. The Business Finance Store sees limitless potential in the current climate, and looks forward to many strong years of growth to come. Take some time to review their services, and give them a call.
For more information, or a free, no-obligation analysis of your business needs, visit The Business Finance Store website: http://www.businessfinancestore.com. A member of their professional staff will contact you to discuss your business' short and long-term goals. Whatever you need, The Business Finance Store is there.
McFeatters, Money has the votes in November - Abington Mariner
President Barack Obama holds a fundraiser hosted by George Clooney and rakes in $15 million for his re-election campaign. Mitt Romney goes to Vegas with his new friend, Donald Trump, he of the gravity-defying hair and gargantuan ego, and raises $2 million in a couple of hours.
Obama has well over $300 million in his war chest but super political action committees supporting him are not doing so well. Romney has raised about $56 million but super PACs wanting to elect him are getting huge amounts of money, worrying the White House. Some wealthy donors are giving millions of dollars — each — to elect Romney.
It used to be illegal for the super rich to finance campaigns, but since the Supreme Court’s famed 2010 Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission ruling that money is equivalent to free speech, rich people can give to their hearts’ content through super PACs. And super PACs are not even required to disclose their donors.
Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife kept Newt Gingrich on the campaign trail for months with reported donations of $16.5 million to Winning Our Future, the Gingrich super PAC.
It is now a given that the presidential contests and congressional elections this year will total $3 billion.
ABBA was right: “Money. Money. Money. ... It’s a rich man’s world.”
Which raises the question: What do all the millionaires and billionaires get in return for their fat checks?
Trump, the entertainer, gets a second huge round of publicity, which makes people watch “Celebrity Apprentice,” which makes him even richer. And he gets access to Romney, who has a 50-50 chance of becoming president.
Adelson becomes a player. Even though Newt was his man, watch for the Adelsons to drop a few million into a super PAC backing Romney. The prize? Access to a pro-business president.
Believe it. A president who has dined with someone who has given big bucks to get him elected will take a telephone call from him/her or invite that person to a state dinner or listen carefully when a regulatory matter involving that person is brought to his attention. And it continues, especially if the president wants to be re-elected.
There are many who think the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision on super PACs is one of the most anti-democratic decisions in our history. Defenders of the decision say it is pro-democracy because it defends everyone’s right to put their money where their mouths are.
At any rate, there is no doubt that it is a pro-big-wealth decision because it gives more power to people with money. Those who live paycheck to paycheck may contribute a few dollars to a political campaign, but those who sit on millions of dollars are able to contribute vastly more. And that means clout.
What each of us does have is a vote. But that, too, is under assault. Efforts are under way in such swing states as Florida to make voting harder. Even though there is no evidence that voter fraud is widespread, more than 17 states are instituting tough new restrictions on voting.
They will go into effect this November in such ways as requiring seniors to get new photo identification. Some states no longer will accept student IDs. Some states are curtailing early voting and/or absentee ballots. Volunteers at election sites are being threatened with serious penalties if they make a mistake, encouraging them to err on the side of denying voters access to ballots.
Taken in tandem, these two new developments — unlimited money and voter restrictions — could be enough in a photo-finish election to decide the results. And yet we hear little consternation from those most affected: voters.
Perhaps it is because it’s summer and it’s tiresome to think of election politics. But come November, it may be too late. Shout, people! Shout!
Scripps Howard columnist Ann McFeatters has covered the White House and national politics since 1986. Email amcfeatters@nationalpress.com.
How Kickstarter facilitates financial investments - Reuters Blogs
Remember Flint and Tinder, the Kickstarter underwear project I wrote about last month? Well, it ended up raising $291,493 in all — almost ten times its initial $30,000 goal. In that sense, it’s like a mini-Pebble, the watch which raised $10,266,845 on Kickstarter and exceeded its goal by a factor of 102. Pebble was quite open about the fact that they were going to Kickstarter after having been rejected by more conventional sources of funding: a lot of VCs turned them down before the Kickstarter campaign went viral. And now, with $10 million in the bank, it’s not clear whether Pebble wants or needs any VC money at all.
Flint and Tinder, by contrast, does want more money, despite raising much more than it asked for. I got an email from Jake Bronstein, the man behind it, today: “I am currently trying to raise money from investors for this project,” he wrote, “to finance CapX improvements to the factory to make our product truly competitive”.
Actually, I should be a bit more accurate: I was copied on an email from Jake Bronstein, which was actually addressed to Reuters’s editor-in-chief, Steve Adler. The subject line? “I think one of your reporters is harassing me / can someone have a look”.
Bronstein’s request was that I remove a link to a YouTube video which I included in an update to my post. It seems that now he’s asking real investors for money, rather than just people who think it’s a good idea to buy underwear on Kickstarter, those investors will want to do things like check out Flint and Tinder’s website. After all, the Kickstarter page says that the main way the company can be competitive is by selling directly from its website. But if you try to find Flint and Tinder’s website, by Googling it, you’ll find that no such site exists. Instead, my post is the top search result.
Bronstein doesn’t want potential investors following that particular link, for much the same reason as he has now taken down his highly NSFW website, jakebronstein.com. That URL now redirects to his about.me page; that, in turn, links to his Wikipedia entry, which features an incomplete list of his publicity stunts, and describes his occupation as “Ex-Road Ruler, current-prankster and blogger Zoomdoggle”. But Bronstein has erased Zoomdoggle, too, from the internet.
Kickstarter is quite clear that it doesn’t vet projects, or their founders. And no one expects Flint and Tinder’s 5,578 funders to have done some kind of due diligence on the company. But this project is very far from Kickstarter’s core mission of providing funding for one-off creative projects. Kickstarter’s very first rule is unambiguous on this front:
1. Funding for projects only.
A project has a clear goal, like making an album, a book, or a work of art. A project will eventually be completed, and something will be produced by it. A project is not open-ended. Starting a business, for example, does not qualify as a project.
Flouting this restriction, Bronstein talks on his Kickstarter page about how “for every 1000 pair we sell per month, 1 full-time job has to be added back to the assembly line”. That seems pretty open-ended to me. And if he’s now looking for investors, that sounds like he’s starting a business, too. Not to mention the fact that in a follow-up email today, Bronstein said that my ego was getting in the way of his “earnest attempts at job creation”.
In a comment he left on my original post, Bronstein accused me of not being diligent in researching his background on the internet — which is kinda funny, given that he seems to be trying as hard as possible for people to do just that, both by taking down his own websites and by asking sites like Reuters to remove content about him.
Still, Flint and Tinder is clearly more than just another instance of Kickstarter looking like the Home Shopping Network. It’s also something rarer: an instance of Kickstarter being used as a way of making a company much more attractive to potential investors.
This happens in two ways. One is that a successful Kickstarter project acts as proof-of-demand: potential investors in Flint and Tinder, for instance, now know that there are thousands of people out there who, quite literally, buy into its project. And on top of that, Kickstarter funds constitute a source of unbelievably cheap unsecured debt, with a zero interest rate and no set maturity date; in the case of Flint and Tinder, moreover, that financing is repayable entirely in underwear.
Once a company has the best part of $300,000 in interest-free financing repayable at a time of its choosing in underwear, the famous underpants gnome business model starts looking actually rather attractive. I’m not entirely sure where or how Kickstarter funds would feature in an investment banker’s model of a company’s capital structure. They’re basically equity, without any kind of ownership or voting rights, which is offset against a set of future deliverables. In any case, Kickstarter funds will nearly always make any company’s balance sheet look a good deal healthier.
And so Kickstarter becomes more than just a way of funding projects, and more than just a way of demonstrating demand for as-yet-nonexistent products. It can also be a way of making your company a lot more attractive to potential investors. Kickstarter has made the decision that it’s not getting into the crowdfunding business as envsiaged in the JOBS Act. But in a way, it’s being dragged into investment markets whether it likes it or not. Unless, of course, it starts cracking down on the likes of Flint and Tinder.
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