“Telling a New Story”

The two most common noises heard on the first floor of the Chamber offices are the buzzer at the front door and the ringing of the main phone line. Thankfully, we have the astute Lane Carroll to help steer the traffic. Every single day, people come to us either in person or by phone in search of information about our community. Sometimes it’s a new resident looking to learn more about living in Tallahassee. On other occasions, it’s a company representative searching for ways to stir up some business. Each time the request is different, but they all have the same goal in mind…to find some piece of information about Tallahassee that they can’t get anywhere else.

With this in mind, the Chamber team is constantly working to be the best possible ambassadors for our hometown. To be good at this job, we must also be sound storytellers. Fortunately, Tallahassee has many great stories that are worth sharing with the masses. Over the past few years, our team has made it a priority to find and tell compelling success stories that come from our members. To do this, we have invested significant resources into becoming an organization that celebrates what makes Tallahassee such and incredible place to work, live and visit. This week, those efforts culminated in our newly remodeled website.

Much like our front door and phone lines, our website is an important destination for both members and other interested souls to discover valuable information about who the Chamber is as an organization and perhaps more importantly, who Tallahassee is as a community. Our online home, www.talchamber.com, has long been an important resource for this, but now with a freshly designed front page, our team is excited to bring more updates, news and content to members than ever before. The new talchamber.com was created with three goals in mind; educating our members, advocating for a growing community and celebrating what makes Tallahassee special.

With over 1,400 members in the Chamber, there are an endless amount of positive, interesting and relevant stories that need to be told about those who are shaping and growing Tallahassee. Between outlets like this weekly column, video series like Talent Lives Here and GrowTLH, member news, event recaps, CEO Spotlights and the Tallahassee Business Podcast, we are hard at work to deliver those stories on a regularly scheduled basis. The talchamber.com homepage is now an important place to go when looking to find and share news about Tallahassee’s business community.

Our new homepage comes after a multiyear effort to improve how the Chamber communicates both with our members and the broader community. There have been many conversations about how we should do this, but the best and most consistent advice has come from our good friend Steve Evans. Some years ago, there was a business group visiting Tallahassee and as part of their work in the community they did a deep dive on our collective web presence. As Steve tells the story, that group came across many images of live oak trees, our universities, smiling children and the Capitol, but little was found about the growing economy and the companies who were adding vitality to the community. Despite being a place with hundreds of compelling business stories, the word was not getting out. This was both a wake up call and an opportunity.

Since first hearing that story from Steve Evans, our team has been steadily working to change what comes up in the google search for Tallahassee. Today, as you venture to talchamber.com, you will find numerous pieces of content that are the result of a belief that a Chamber of Commerce can and should be a place to find good news about business and the people who conduct it.

Thanks to Steve Evans, various Chamber leaders, our dedicated staff and all our members we have been able to make telling the Tallahassee business story a priority. As you can imagine, there is a great deal of work and preparation that goes into making videos, blogs, podcasts, events and other storytelling mechanisms that shine a bright light on our community, but we are seeing strong results and that makes it worthwhile. To those who keep reading, watching, liking and sharing the Chamber’s content, we appreciate your support. As always, you are the fuel for our shared success. Because of your patronage and membership, we are now able to produce more good stories for Tallahassee than ever before.

We hope you will take a moment to visit the all new www.talchamber.com and spend some time enjoying the latest stories from our thriving business community. Perhaps your business story will be next.

Jay Revell

Vice President, Advocacy and Public Policy