Business owners, executives network at DOYO

By KALEA HALL

khall@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

Carmella Williams attended DOYO Live for the second year in a row to learn new ways to market her business and to network.

“It’s a great place to learn new, and sometimes common sense, things I don’t know about,” Williams said.

Williams is the owner of Carmella Marie, a local hair product company.

“I think [learning] the basic things helps my bottom line,” she said.

Small business and big business owners along with executives of major companies and others were in attendance at this year’s DOYO Live, a digital marketing and interactive design conference.

The house at Youngstown State University’s Williamson College of Business was full with more than 260 people there to learn new ways to develop content and deliver that content in a way that better connects with the audience.

“When it comes to an event like this we want to make sure that you walk away feeling like you learned something that you can implement in your business, you’ve connected and, first and foremost, just have a really great experience. I think if we do those things, which we have in the past and we are doing now, that leads to a very successful event,” said Dennis Schiraldi, founder of DOYO Live and the downtown marketing firm, CYO Marketing.

After a welcome from YSU President Jim Tressel and Schiraldi, DOYO Live attendees heard from keynote speaker Debra Jasper, CEO of Mindset Digital, a marketing company based in Columbus, and an international speaker.

Jasper is a former print reporter who still believes in the power of storytelling.

With such a distracting world, Jasper gave tips for how to tell story that grabs attention.

“We see 5,000 brand images a day,” Jasper said. “We are not taking all of those in. We have become a nation of skimmers and scanners.”

To get attention and keep attention, Jasper says that people tune in to the informal more than the formal.

“It’s a people-to-people world and we have to think about getting more informal,” she sad.

Jasper went over ways to make emails, presentations and LinkedIn profiles more attractive for the audience.

“They really have to shift how they are communicating,” Jasper said. “Everything needs to be short, organized and skimmable because today’s clients are so hyper distracted they are not tuning in to anything that is long, meandering or not engaging.”

After Jasper’s talk, attendees listened in on a leadership panel with Rob Palowitz of PALO Creative and Nate Riggs of NR Media Group.

“We totally need [events] like this to help educate,” Palowitz said. “It’s more precise and more exact to use digital marketing and you can hit specific targets, but other media outlets still apply. [Digital marketing] is another tool to the tool box.”

Following the panel were three breakout sessions with seven track options each.

Tracy Prizant, owner of Salt Sensations LLC, a first-year attendee, said the event was “really empowering for a small business owner.”

“I really try to engage and stay connected,” she said.