Meet Our Rising Media Stars!

Do you ever wonder what happens to Local Business People Of The Year after they win their hometown title? 

Well, a lot happens to many of them, including much more visibility and often more referrals and new business. 

In fact, you can hear from a few past winners in a roundtable discussion this week that I'm co-hosting with Sue Brooke called, "Make It BIG On Alignable!" (Save your seat for this April 11th event. It will be fun).

Beyond elevating their stature and status on Alignable, many of these winners also escalate their buzz in their communities and sometimes even nationally. In fact, we want to shine a special spotlight on several winners who've been taking the press by storm as of late. 

(But, before we begin, I'm sure we have missed some winners with media placements out there. So, if you see one of our 2023 contest winners who's in the news and not represented in this article, send me a note at chuck@alignable.com with a link, and I will update this story -- or add the information to a future feature). 

Based on past contest years, this coverage we're about to showcase is just the beginning of what will land. We have the rest of 2023 to celebrate these wins -- across the network, in your LinkedIn profiles, in your professional bios, among local organizations, in social media, and in the press.

New Alignable Celebrities Generating "Ink" -- GO TAMMY!

Here are some of the wonderful winners we've spotted in the news so far.

First up, we have a beautiful television segment from NBC Affiliate, WVVA-TV in West Virginia. It features Hatter's Bookshop and Princeton, WV's 2023 Local Business Person Of The Year Tammy Dotson.

WVVA certainly shows how much they care about local small businesses in this segment and we're very excited for Tammy. When you have a minute, please watch this clip and give Tammy a shout-out. We're sure she'd love to hear from you.

Next up, we have JB Beckett of Beckett Financial Group who was the top vote-getter across all of North America in 2023's Local Business Person Of The Year Contest. JB was just featured in a Credit Union Times article. 

We've known JB for years because of his active involvement across the Alignable network and his support of many businesses here. So, we asked him for a quote to accompany one of our pitches around a financial poll we conducted. 

Days later, he was featured in this article, along with his photo:

Click the image above to see the rest of the article and tell JB you saw him in The Credit Union Times! 

Look At How Many Members Are Becoming Media Darlings

Here are the rest of the new Alignable All-Stars we've found in the media (to date) in 2023. Many of the following previews are snippets from our monitoring service and Google News. 

Some even show our very photogenic members. Go ahead and click on the images if you want to see more of their in-depth coverage.  

In all, there are 700+ media placements out there already for contest winners in 2023, but you'd never read this article if I put all of those hits in here...:). That said, hopefully, we captured most of our members who are in the media spotlight right now.

Hey, That's Pretty Exciting, Right? (I Hope You Agree).

If you're a winner and you haven't personalized the "swiss cheese" press release that we sent you as part of our Marketing & Media Kit, please take a few minutes in the next week to tackle that project. 

And then send your personalized, updated release to your local media outlets, targeting the business, local news, features and/or "human interest" editors.

Before long, you could very well start to generate this kind of coverage yourself. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me and I'll give you more tips and assistance. And, if you're a 2023 winner and your email including the Marketing & Media Kit got lost along the way, no worries! Please let me know and I'll make sure you get a link STAT.

Send Some Big Shout-Outs To Winners In The News

For everyone else reading this article, kindly reach out to the winners listed here and congratulate them on their wins -- and their coverage. 

We can all use a little boost on a regular basis -- so don't be shy about "sharing some love" with your peers. (Hey, they might give you some networking tips along the way, too).

If you'd like, try to set up a quick meeting with them to discuss how you might be able to help each other with your businesses. 

We'll update more of this coverage in future stories and in our Local Biz Person Of The Year Group. 

If you haven't joined that group yet, you really should, as you'll find the best networkers -- and many of the most helpful people on Alignable -- congregated there. 

Thanks for reading!