By Alex Robinson
Over the next five months, Flushing business owners and entrepreneurs will be able to take advantage of a new program that will enable them to become more Web savvy.
One Flushing, a community-based economic development center, launched a boot camp last Thursday to offer assistance to businesses seeking to establish an online presence through a number of tools, including social media.
“We’re hoping the use of social media, Web and online marketing could propel some of these businesses to generate more sales and customers outside of their existing base,” said John Choe, the organization’s director.
One Flushing has been holding business assistance workshops over the last year, but the new boot camp’s focus on new technologies is a fresh approach for Flushing businesses hoping to bring themselves into the digital age, Choe said.
The program will run in monthly workshops on the last Thursday of every month. The next session will be being March 27.
Choe said the organization decided to focus on e-commerce this year, after hearing feedback from last year’s participants who wanted to learn how they can apply new technologies to their businesses.
The boot camp will teach businesses about targeting a wider customer base by building their own websites and signing up for new services, such as an online payment system that bypasses credit card companies and provides a secure way of avoiding high transaction fees.
After each workshop, there will be an opportunity for entrepreneurs and business owners to have one-on-one consulting sessions the following Friday. The program’s facilitators, who are all volunteers from the community that have a background in information technology, will use these to follow up with participants and to help launch specific technologies for existing businesses such as websites and social media accounts.
These sit-down sessions will give business owners the chance to create the things they would have learned about in the workshop, Choe said.
“If you don’t have a website, we want to make sure that by the end of your participation in our boot camp, you’ll have one. If you don’t have a Yelp page, we’ll create one for you,” Choe said. “We’re trying to make it less abstract and more hands-on so it has a concrete benefit at the end of the boot camp.”
These consulting sessions will be by appointment and will prioritize boot camp participants. Choe said all are welcome to the boot camp, which will take place at One Flushing Community Economic Development Center, at 39-01 Main St., Suite 511, in downtown Flushing.
It will be free for participants and open to the public, but seating is limited and pre-registration is required.
The main session will be taught in English, but One Flushing has staff that can speak Chinese and a number of other languages.
Reach reporter Alex Robinson by e-mail at arobinson@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4566.
