The national unemployment rate might be on the decline, but tell that to Kristen Said and Joe Casabona, two recent college graduates who got tired of hunting for jobs that didn’t materialize and decided to start their own business.

We want to thank the Record for running the story. Read it here.

Focus Groups: Facebook Pages come with discussion boards. That means we create the discussions and garner feedback from our fans. But is it useful feedback?

Our target market is students, parents, and educators. We know all of our friends were (or currently are) students. We also have a good amount of parents and even more educators (I know a lot of people who were education majors). By creating focus groups online, we can get all kinds of perspective from people from several backgrounds with different perspectives.

Sharing: On our Facebook Page, we can share news, photos, and thoughts with our fans. We can use it to create buzz and keep people updated on what we are doing. By sharing, we can get people talking.

Networking: By creating buzz and sharing our experiences, we can create connections with the people that matter most to us- those that we want to help. We can then give them a system that works best for them based on their feedback. Using our Facebook Page, we can create of network of friends and business partners, and connect with the people that will gain the most from our system.

We can also ask our friends and fans if there is someone they think Minerva would be a good fit for. By keeping them educated on what we are doing and what the system does, they will know what we do well enough to make referrals.

Facebook Pages is a great example of how to make social media work for you and your business, and it’s a win-win. Businesses get the feedback they are looking for and users/fans are given a medium in which they can talk directly to the business.

While we’ve been working sans-office up until this point, we feel now that we’ll be operating in the same place daily, we’ll really be able to start making the moves we need to get Cognition off the ground. We are also really excited to share a building with great, very helpful people, like Blackout Design (who did our awesome logos) and the GVTA. We’d like to especially thank the GVTA for our desks, which they gave us free of charge.

We’ve posted up some photos of the office on our Facebook page- you can view the album here. While you’re over there, also be sure to become a fan!