Hello World!
Specifically… Hello Tracy!
Introducing Matt Higa…Our Virtual Ambassador Chair:
Hello
As a young up-and-coming entrepreneur I’m thrilled that I get to team up with Sofia on reinventing the Chamber of Commerce and creating the most valuable resource for small businesses.
A Little About Me
Most of my life has been moving. Never staying in one place longer than 3-5 years. I’ve moved across the country twice and across an ocean once. Until I ended up in Tracy where I’ve lived since 2006 and have now come to recognize as my hometown.
This town is the birthplace of my proudest accomplishments thus far: earning the rank of Eagle Scout, claiming unanimous superior with the Tracy High band, and graduating from Tracy High with an IB certificate. And now I hope to make it the birthplace of my professional career.
My Experience
After graduating from Tracy High I attended the University of the Pacific where I studied Engineering Management with a focus on Computer Engineer (quite a mouthful!). I made the switch from explicitly computer engineering when I realized that my natural skills as a leader made me a more effective project manager than a code monkey.
Prior to the switch I’d been teaching myself marketing as I was always fascinated by how social media could be used to help businesses. I learned many ways in which social media could help a business (big or small) engage with their customers more to increase sales and build customer loyalty. Taking my first marketing classes confirmed for me that I was on the right track and I learned how to fuse traditional marketing tactics with social media to create even more effective campaigns.
The Next Level
Towards the end of my third year at school I began exploring a specific area of marketing known as branding. The reason I did this was because I had come to believe that branding was the ultimate marketing strategy because any successful business has one. Whether they’re a small cake shop with 5 employees or a massive corporation with 5000, a critical ingredient in their recipe for success was a solid brand.
Marketing in general can be overwhelming for most small businesses, and branding being its own specific focus with its own unique set of challenges can be downright daunting. But it doesn’t have to be.
That’s where I hope to be of value. Because Sofia is right, “you don’t know what you don’t know”. I’ve studied marketing and technology for 5+ years and there are still many aspects of it that I find challenging, but there are a lot of things that I’ve learned that can be useful to you right now.
What I’ll Be Blogging About
The ideas and stories I will be focusing on in this blog will center around branding. But if you know even a little about branding you know that that’s still an insanely general topic area.
So I’m going to be breaking branding up into specialized series starting with social media. I want to start with social media because from what I’ve observed of most small business (not just in Tracy) is that they really struggle with. And that’s for one simple reason…
You don’t know what you don’t know.
Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
-Matt Higa