Pictured l to r: Vera Primus (National Sec/Treasure), Maggie Anderson (Founder of the Empowerment Experiment and President’s Award Winner), Deborah Crable (Board Chair), and Norm Bond (National President)
BALTIMORE – With the touch of a finger on a computer keypad in the comfort of your own home, you can be transported globally instantaneously and engage in business on an international scale. And blacks must capitalize on this exciting new reality and bolster each other’s business prospects.
That was the theme of the National Alliance of Market Developers’ 58th annual convention at the Tremonts Hotel. With the 2010 theme, “Act Local, Market Global,” interwoven throughout the three-day conference, NAMD is crafting innovative methodology to help black businesspeople and entrepreneurs in sales, marketing and public relations to develop and cultivate new platforms for engaging in business, particularly with other Africans in the Diaspora.
“We are here to find new ways to capture and identify and find and measure the black consumer market. Our focus in our first 50 years was local, meaning national. We are now able to build new paradigms for understanding the measurements of the black consumer globally,” says NAMD chairperson Deborah Crable.
The NAMD conference included an annual awards dinner that paid homage to the likes of publisher Pat Lottier of the Atlanta Tribune and McGee Williams Osse and Fay Ferguson, the co-CEO’s of Burrell Communications Group. Dynamic panel discussions explored such topics as: how to start and manage a business online; branding your company through social media; developing effective social media strategies; and how to market your business on a global scale.
With the advent of the information superhighway and the ubiquity of the Internet, Crable and NAMD seek to leverage and harness its awesome power to further advance black businesses.
“NAMD has been there from the beginning in terms of documenting the black purchasing power,” says NAMD national president Norm Bond. “And we’re an advocacy group for the African American consumer market and also a professional group for networking amongst people in the industry as well as a way to help students get involved in careers in marketing, sales and advertising.” –terry shropshire
