Guest Blog by Janet Craig, owner of Mt. Dora Sushi & Steak

In addition to owning Mt. Dora Sushi & Steak Janet Craig is a board member of the Mount Dora Village Merchant's & Business Association, Inc. and serves as the association's marketing chairperson. Janet also maintains a blog on the Mt. Dora Sushi & Steak website and a super successful Twitter site with over 16,000 followers and counting!

It all started with a KISS at Mt Dora Sushi

“If you only do what you know you can do, you'll never do very much.” - Krause

It all started with this blog back in Mar 09 about how I reluctantly became an "actress" in a FOX TV commercial to promote our great little town- Mount Dora, Florida.
At the time I was on the ad committee of the MDVMBA (Mt Dora merch assn) but didn't want to be in the commercial. Mt Dora Sushi was only 1yr old and required my full time attention and besides, I'm not into the fame. It was here on the "set" I met Brian Young. I knew Brian and his girlfriend Rachelle owned the popular Tremain St Cottages and Brian created and runs www.WhatToDoInMountDora.com but we were not in the same social circles.
We immediately connected as he chatted up the importance of blogging, marketing and social media. These days I look forward to date night when Brian and Rachelle meet me and Eric at one of our other great little downtown Mount Dora restaurants
.

Brian and Rachelle have inspired us at Mt Dora Sushi to look outside of our marketing box and promote, promote, promote..and our friendship is blossoming into a huge media bouquet thats smelling pretty darn sweet.

The blog about the commercial shoot was the very first posted by Mt Dora Sushi. Rachelle has a great blog about being an innkeeper. Brian also has a blog about whats going on in Mount Dora.

In the past few months Brian and I organized a fantastic event to promote downtown Mount Dora..the Highwayman Artwalk. I learned the importance of a press release, posters and how much promoting an event needs to be successful. It generated huge sales for the merchants and a front page newspaper article mentioning our promotional efforts.

..Yay for Mount Dora! We all need the business right now in this snowbird economy driven town in the middle of July...and we actually had fun doing it.

After that we were urged to Twitter and today we have over 15,000 followers! Its actually a fun competition between Brian(@mountdora) Rachelle(@travelblggr) and Mt Dora Sushi (@mtdorasushi)...at least on my end. I love to have customers come in because they read Takashi and me tweeting facts or the days events. It's hugely satisfying.
I admit my blogging has suffered but am determined to get it all balanced...
From Twitter came an introduction to a Tampa food personality and author Jaden Hair(@steamykitchen) ...and here I am.
With sweating hands and high anxiety I am faced with an early morning drive to NBC in Tampa to shoot a cooking segment for television....all about making miso soup, lol. It will air on Sept 23 09. I found out its all scripted and I guess it isn't about the soup at all..I have 15 "free speak" seconds. That's 15 seconds to tell the world we are here.
Jaden has a great cookbook "Steamy Kitchen" and Rachelle is working on a recipe book featuring innkeepers...seriously thinking about creating a Mt Dora Sushi roll cookbook now...hmm..from little town sushi chef to being the #1 ranked sushi bar on Twitter , to TV, to author???
...........and it all started with a kiss.

See the Original Fox TV commercial w/Brian and Janet HERE

You can contact Brian to get promotional ideas OR you can find him in our beer garden or at the sushi bar most any night... and he always gets his wine for free.