The USCA “Best of Local Business” Award Program recognizes outstanding local businesses throughout the country. Each year, the USCA identifies companies that they believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community.

Nationwide, only 1 in 120 (less than 1%) 2011 Award recipients qualified as Three-Time Award Winners. Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2011 USCA Award Program focuses on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the USCA and data provided by third parties.

About U.S. Commerce Association (USCA)

U.S. Commerce Association (USCA) is a New York City based organization funded by local businesses operating in towns, large and small, across America. The purpose of USCA is to promote local business through public relations, marketing and advertising.

The USCA was established to recognize the best of local businesses in their community. Our organization works exclusively with local business owners, trade groups, professional associations, chambers of commerce and other business advertising and marketing groups. Our mission is to be an advocate for small and medium size businesses and business entrepreneurs across America.

SOURCE: U.S. Commerce Association

CONTACT:
U.S. Commerce Association
Email: PublicRelations@uscaaward.com
URL: http://www.uscaaward.com

At some point you will decide whether or not songwriting is a hobby or a career. A hobby is something you do without expecting financial reward. If you achieve some success as a by-product that’s great, but I can almost guarantee that a “hobby” songwriter never makes a substantial living doing so. Everybody who is truly successful these days is tenacious as all get out whether it is developing social networks to promote their music or trying to get songs placed in film and television projects. Even on the professional writer level I would say 1 or 2 out of 20 songs ever generate substantial income and if they write 2 or 3 hits a year they have been a tremendous success. In fact they would probably win BMI or ASCAP “Songwriter Of The Year” awards. That’s true for country, pop, urban and all contemporary genres.

It just won’t magically happen unless you’re Rebecca Black and you’re so bad you’re good. I consider that to be a novelty record. It won’t happen like that again for a while. The last one was William Hung or maybe even the “Pants On the Ground” dude. But those are rare events. I certainly wouldn’t recommend that as a career path. YOU will have to be like a dog with a bone.

It used to be – back in the day – everybody ran around trying to get songs cut by an artist. Now, for lots of reasons, it’s all about getting songs in Film and TV. Makes sense given the many changes in the industry in recent years, not the least of which is the ability for just about anyone to produce master quality tracks on their laptop and the proliferation of outlets. Basically, we’ve gradually gone from 13 TV channels to 1000 in the course of the last 20 years and all those channels – thankfully – need music. It’s virtually impossible to channel-hop and not hear music in the background or featured on almost every station. This demand has created a boom for songwriters and music creators and it’s not going away. If one throws in all the opportunities in the commercial/advertising area … well, you get my point. We are never going back to 13 channels, and it’s a good thing. The market to get outside songs recorded by artists has gone in the other direction, making it more difficult to get the traditional cut (unless you are writing with the artist or producer). This has become the best way to get your songs recorded in the traditional sense. Don’t get me wrong a great “outside” song can still get cut and make tons of money, but it’s just more difficult. But none of this is or has ever been easy.

So a great way to monetize your catalogue or get cuts/usages is to spend some time focusing on songs for Film and TV. Think in terms lyrically of ideas that can apply cinematically. A great example of this is George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone.” This song applies to any scene where a bad guy shows up onscreen, which seemingly happens in almost every movie ever made. Another great example is Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight.” This song can anticipate a confrontation or romantic moment. There are a few of those scenes around as well, right? Do you have either one of those in your catalogue? If you don’t, write one today.

Good luck!

I HAD COME DOWN THE CHIMNEY,
WITH PRESENTS TO GIVE,
AND TO SEE JUST WHO,
IN THIS HOME, DID LIVE.

I LOOKED ALL ABOUT,
A STRANGE SIGHT I DID SEE,
NO TINSEL, NO PRESENTS,
NOT EVEN A TREE.

NO STOCKING BY MANTLE,
JUST BOOTS FILLED WITH SAND,
ON THE WALL HUNG PICTURES,
OF FAR DISTANT LANDS.

WITH MEDALS AND BADGES,
AWARDS OF ALL KINDS,
A SOBER THOUGHT,
CAME THROUGH MY MIND.

FOR THIS HOUSE WAS DIFFERENT,
IT WAS DARK AND DREARY,
I FOUND THE HOME OF A SOLDIER,
ONCE I COULD SEE CLEARLY.

THE SOLDIER LAY SLEEPING,
SILENT, ALONE,
CURLED UP ON THE FLOOR,
IN THIS ONE BEDROOM HOME.

THE FACE WAS SO GENTLE,
THE ROOM IN DISORDER,
NOT HOW I PICTURED,
A TRUE BRITISH SOLDIER.

WAS THIS THE HERO,
OF WHOM I’D JUST READ?
CURLED UP ON A PONCHO,
THE FLOOR FOR A BED?

I REALISED THE FAMILIES,
THAT I SAW THIS NIGHT,
OWED THEIR LIVES TO THESE SOLDIERS,
WHO WERE WILLING TO FIGHT.

SOON ROUND THE WORLD,
THE CHILDREN WOULD PLAY,
AND GROWNUPS WOULD CELEBRATE,
A BRIGHT CHRISTMAS DAY.

THEY ALL ENJOYED FREEDOM,
EACH MONTH OF THE YEAR,
BECAUSE OF THE SOLDIERS,
LIKE THE ONE LYING HERE.

I COULDN’T HELP WONDER,
HOW MANY LAY ALONE,
ON A COLD CHRISTMAS EVE,
IN A LAND FAR FROM HOME.

THE VERY THOUGHT BROUGHT,
A TEAR TO MY EYE,
I DROPPED TO MY KNEES,
AND STARTED TO CRY.

THE SOLDIER AWAKENED,
AND I HEARD A ROUGH VOICE,
“SANTA DON’T CRY,
THIS LIFE IS MY CHOICE;

I FIGHT FOR FREEDOM,
I DON’T ASK FOR MORE,
MY LIFE IS MY GOD,
MY COUNTRY, MY CORPS..”

THE SOLDIER ROLLED OVER,
AND DRIFTED TO SLEEP,
I COULDN’T CONTROL IT,
I CONTINUED TO WEEP.

I KEPT WATCH FOR HOURS,
SO SILENT AND STILL,
AND WE BOTH SHIVERED,
FROM THE COLD NIGHT’S CHILL.

I DID NOT WANT TO LEAVE,
ON THAT COLD, DARK, NIGHT,
THIS GUARDIAN OF HONOR,
SO WILLING TO FIGHT.

THEN THE SOLDIER ROLLED OVER,
WITH A VOICE SOFT AND PURE,
WHISPERED, “CARRY ON SANTA,
IT’S CHRISTMAS DAY, ALL IS SECURE.”

ONE LOOK AT MY WATCH,
AND I KNEW HE WAS RIGHT.
MERRY CHRISTMAS MY FRIEND,
AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT.

This poem was supposedly written by a Peacekeeping soldier stationed overseas, and it includes the following request:

PLEASE. Would you do me the kind favour of sending this to as many people as you can? Christmas will be coming soon and some credit is due to all of the service men and women for our being able to celebrate these festivities. Let’s try in this small way to pay a tiny bit of what we owe. Make people stop and think of our heroes, living and dead, who sacrificed themselves for us. Please, do your small part to plant this small seed.

First and foremost, it’s becoming more and more difficult to actually find any content of value…for free. I tried to lookup somebody’s snail mail address the other day, and FORGET IT! Every option turned out to be a come-on for a one-time or monthly fee in order to get the information. What happened to the phone book??? It used to be on the Internet along with some for-pay options, but lately all you seem to find is the pay me now sites.

On top of that, for many searches these days Google has become nothing but a collection of dead ends. I guess they were so busy indexing every single page on the Internet that they forgot about checking them frequently to make sure they were still active pages. And you can often forget about relevency, since many of the pages returned these days are nothing more than “landing” pages that include links to other “landing” pages, with no real content on any of them. These pages exist for the sole purpose of trying to attract your clicks so they can collect money from Google and the other search companies.

Even long time stalwarts of dependability are falling victim to “progress.” Yesterday I tried to generate directions for a trip I was planning. I went to my trusty friend MapQuest because they have long offered a great “send to cell” service. But this time that wonderful service seemed to be down and out. The “send to cell” link was gone, and in its place was a generic “send” option. There WAS a “cell” option, but instead of sending my directions it sent me an advertising link to some crappy game site. I was astonished!

So I decided to give the fairly new Microsoft product Bing a run for it’s money. I thought that surely the ol’ Redmond dinosaur would have a “send to cell” option on the product they’ve spent so much money and time developing and promoting. And so they did! Unfortunately, although the Bing system SAID it had sent a text message to my phone, nothing ever arrived. Hopefully Microsoft will fix this small “bug” and their intention of providing this valuable service will come to pass. But alas, that thought was of no use for this trip!

After doing a Google search for “send directions to cell phone” I found a site call TripIt which looked promising. It SAID it offered this service, but after playing around with their offering for over 15 minutes I still could not figure out how to accomplish said task, assuming it’s really even possible at all and not just another advertising come-on.

So once again, it all comes down to content and usability, two areas that seem to be falling behind the ongoing effort to turn the Internet into the next source of excessive advertising, confusion and hyperbole. Yahoo’s original idea of having a DIRECTORY that was assembled and supervised by REAL PEOPLE (as opposed to a search engine that is supervised by a computer) is turning out to be a pretty smart idea after all. The more that companies look to the Internet solely as another source of revenue and overlook the concepts of content and usability, the more valuable a directory that returns only valid results will become.

Now if we could only get websites to simplify their offerings on sites that ARE valuable so you could easily find what you’re looking for…but that’s a whole other story!

So we called Time Warner, only to discover that they were doing “maintenance.” WHAT!!?? Maintenance during the work week that interupts your connection? What ever happened to the concept of doing maintenance during “off hours” so you don’t inconvenience your customers? When I worked in the radio industry and we had to take a transmitter offline for maintenance, we’d schedule it at midnight and work through the night so we didn’t inconvenience the majority of our listeners. Most companies would never think of taking their servers down in the middle of the day for the same reason. But Time Warner? Right smack in the middle of the day. Wow.

When I asked the technician if there was a way for him to get a comment up the “food chain” so that the powers that be got the message that this was a bad idea, I was told that he had no way of submitting customer comments. Wow again. So I asked him for an email address that I could send a comment to, only to be told that there was not even a mechanism in place to do that! Wow, wow, and wow.

So the question is, does Time Warner even CARE about their customers? I believe there are plenty of good, caring people that work for Time Warner. But as a corporate entity, I think the obvious answer is NO!