Pride Business Expo Goes Virtual

GGBA – America’s First LGBT Chamber of Commerce  – Announces World’s First Virtual Local Business Expo

The GGBA in partnership with LocalPlaceXpo & eZ-Xpo is pleased to announce the 1st GGBA Virtual Local Business Expo Marketplace to help member businesses to boost sales and collaboration worldwide.

San Francisco,CA (I-Newswire) May 24, 2013 – The Golden Gate Business Association(GGBA), America’s first LGBT Chamber of Commerce today announced the world’s 1st GGBA Virtual Local Business Expo Marketplace to coincide with their annual “Pride Businesss Expo” at the Hotel Whitcomb on June 12, 2013. The GGBA virtual expo is being implemented to help jumpstart local business and job creation. Together with LocalPlaceXpo and eZ-Xpo, the new GGBA Virtual Local Business Expo Marketplace will empower every GGBA member exhibitor and sponsors to boost sales and on-going collaboration with both on-demand and live engagement 24/7.

“We are excited to join forces with LocalPlaceXpo and eZ-Xpo to jumpstart the local business with this powerful game changer, and a simple to use Private Business Network Marketplace,” says Eric Goforth, President of GGBA. “Not only will this help boost local business to expand for more exports, but also boost local jobs with eZ-Xpo’s Virtual Job Fair and crowdsourcing capabilities.” (most of our members are local sales/service)

“With GGBA Virtual Local Business Expo Marketplace, every local business can shorten their sales cycle easily and quickly with eZ-Xpo’s marketing automation. Each virtual booth can automatically send qualified leads to the exhibitor for a quick follow-up,” explains Matt Fok, CEO of eZ-Xpo.

“I am confident that our partnership with GGBA will help local businesses expand beyond their current reach and connect online with various opportunities. In today’s competitive world, every local business needs to leverage social media and cloud computing technologies as their secret weapons for better customer care and customer satisfaction,” adds Fok.

Key features of the GGBA Virtual Local Business Expo Marketplace include:

1. Daily Deal – Offering daily deal and discounts for every member. Exhibitors can offer special discounts on their products and services and build a long-term business relationship in their virtual booth.
2. Virtual Expo Showcase – Offering unlimited virtual expo opportunities for all industries within the marketplace. It is a great complementary solution for all physical trade shows or conferences. GGBA can host virtual expo marketplace on a monthly basis with a specific targeted niche industry (i.e., banking, real estate, insurance, health care etc.). Attendees can engage with each exhibitor both on-demand or live via chat, Google Hangout, Skype, or web conferencing.
3. Empowering your sales force – With GGBA LocalPlaceXpo, your marketing and sales teams can listen and respond to community conversations to gain a better understanding of your customers’ business needs while at the same time gain access to qualified buyers. Exhibitors can get all qualified leads with contact information instantly from the virtual booth.
4. Automatic Marketing Automation -Each virtual booth can automatically feed qualified leads (attendees) to exhibitor’s CRM application (i.e., SalesForce, SugarCRM) and email campaign application (i.e., MailChimp, Constant Contact, and Aweber) for higher marketing ROI.
5. Marketing Intelligence – Each virtual booth has built-in marketing analytics to track each attendees activities. Exhibitor can easily identify their best qualified prospect based on their visit duration and the actual marketing content they have viewed.
6. Knowledge sharing – Each virtual booth comes with a variety of online resources like discussion forums, product tours for product documentation and how-to videos to help customers find solutions and solve problems. LocalPlaceXpo makes it easy for people to discover and share interesting content with familiar social networking tools such as “likes” and @mentions.
7. Social self-service – Providing self-service through peer-to-peer support forums and online FAQs saves you money and it also saves your customers time. Exhibitors can host their FAQs in their virtual booth and only surfaces the most relevant information, delivering your customers the right answers in real-time.
8. Virtual Business Ecosystem through your Private Business Network Marketplace.

Helping every community to build your private virtual business ecosystem with strategic partners and customers. The key difference between the Private Business Network Marketplace from Facebook and Linkedin is that you have total control of the content, and policy administration on the marketplace. With a single universal login, attendees can easily navigate from one marketplace (i.e., Virtual Local Business Expo, Virtual Job Fair, and Social Learning Marketplace) to other strategic partners’ marketplaces.

The GGBA Virtual Local Business Expo Marketplace (http://www.LocalPlaceXpo.com/ggba) will be available in early June 2013. It will compliment with the GGBA Annual Pride Business Expo at the Hotel Whitcomb on June 12, 2013.

For all early adopters and game changers, please contact Eric Goforth, President of GGBA, president@GGBA.com , or Danny Parrillo at dparrillo@strategi.biz , or Matt Fok, CEO of eZ-Xpo at mfok@eZ-Xpo.com.

* Product or service names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

About GGBA

Founded in 1974, the Golden Gate Business Association (GGBA) is America’s first LGBT Chamber of Commerce and began as the first business organization founded by gay and lesbian entrepreneurs. The GGBA is a 501(c)(6) non-profit, membership-driven organization consisting of over 350 business entities, community organizations and individuals. Our membership includes small businesses and large corporations, businesses that are LGBT owned/operated and others that are our allies.

As a chamber of commerce, GGBA focuses on connecting the community through business, educating leaders through business skills development, providing marketing muscle for its members to increase their visibility and advocating on their behalf to create positive change socially, economically and politically.

For more information about GGBA, please visit http://www.GGBA.com.