Communities everywhere are trying to build their local economies based on attracting young professionals and the innovative companies of tomorrow. How can economic-development practitioners play an integral part in this mission?

In addition to their traditional tasks, such as marketing available properties and lobbying for incentives, today’s economic development practitioners should see themselves as catalysts for economic growth through social collaboration.

For innovation to thrive, there needs to be strong collaboration among stakeholder groups, open lines of communication, links between the public and private sector, and an understanding of the role that government must play. These are areas in which the economic development practitioner is typically the expert. The practitioner understands the needs of the business community and the capabilities and resources of the public sector, and therefore can provide a communications bridge.

Since the Internet has become the number one tool for businesses and site selectors in their location search, it has to be the foundation for your communications strategy in two ways:

• Providing a primary vehicle for the dissemination of facts, stories and anecdotes about your community and its entrepreneurs, so as to inspire and attract others to locate their businesses there;
• Establishing a shared vision for the future of a community and involving local stakeholders in the achievement of that vision.

Social collaboration is a necessary part of the process of modern investment attraction marketing. In an earlier article in this series we described this process as a distillation -- finding the essence of what makes a community attractive, what kinds of business investment it wants and what characteristics are being sought by its target industries, then promoting key messages in a way that brings that community to the fore.

This evoked a wise response from Dave Quinn, executive director of the Levelland Economic Development Corp. in the City of Levelland, Texas:

“It is important to view economic development as relationship building from the inside out. Utilizing new media resources, economic development professionals must understand that we are selling a story or a perception, not just hard assets. We must open up our daily lives and let prospects share in the ups and downs so that they can truly understand the intangible benefits that they will receive from locating in our community

. . . .
“Using blogs, social media and interactive websites will be a must if a community wishes to compete in today’s economic times.”

The City of Levelland’s economic-development website, www.golevelland.com, is an excellent example of how such sites should be structured to encourage social collaboration as well as to directly promote business investment.

On the home page is a prominent link to a section called Levelland Live. Viewers are invited to “blog with us, share videos and photos of Levelland.” The economic development blog is called Progressive on Purpose and it is full of postings, photos and comments. Posts can be viewed by month and by popularity. Tags are added to help readers find key topics.

Down the right-hand column a reader can see “Levelland Twitter Updates.” In addition, every blog posting – in fact every page of the entire website – contains buttons that permit the page to be e-mailed to someone by the viewer, or distributed by an RSS feed, or extended to the viewer’s social networks using links to Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

There’s also a link to Levelland’s YouTube site, www.youtube.com/user/CityofLevelland. At this writing there were nine videos to be viewed there, the latest being a charming production called “A Minute on Main Street” in which citizens are asked off the cuff to give three words that describe their city.

Levelland very clearly understands the need to promote a strong sense of community and vibrant quality of life by incorporating social collaboration media into its investment-attraction strategy. This is the kind of communications bridge that leads creative entrepreneurs to a community where they want to build their future.

It’s quiet out there, isn’t it? Economic development programs seem to have hit the “pause” button and are stuck there. But underneath the surface of this recession, something is happening that hasn’t happened before.

A new dimension is being added to the business of investment attraction. You could call it the social dimension.

Social software has very quickly moved toward the center of business attention from the periphery. Investment-attraction websites increasingly include social-software tools and links. When site selectors hit the “play” button again, their screens will have a different appearance because this dimension will be added.

It’s no surprise. Some business forecasters saw this trend coming, Gartner among them. A report issued by Gartner in late 2008, Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009, urged business organizations to adopt social media sooner rather than later.

“Your organization is an entity in the broad social Web,” Gartner advised. “Get to know Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social sites and applications. The risks of not participating are growing, while the risks of participating can be mitigated.”

Why should economic developers in particular heed this advice? Because social software has become a means of site evaluation for investors. Site-selection criteria no longer are limited to the traditional quantitative data, such as employment rates, education levels and distances travelled to markets. Such data is still important but now is accompanied by qualitative data – and some of that data is gathered through social software.

All this has come from an economic shift documented by author and consultant Richard Florida, among others, and noted in an earlier article in this series, Economic Development 2.0. The North American economy is moving from jobs based largely on physical skills or repetitive tasks to ones that require analytical skills and judgment. What Florida calls the “creative class” is the dominant force in job creation for the future.

Communities’ economic prospects hinge not so much on luring new companies to town or on economic development strategies of the past, but on their ability to engage the next generation of professionals. The strategic focus for investment attraction has shifted to placemaking -- creating and promoting communities that offer a distinct character, healthy lifestyles and a high quality of life.

For young professionals today, a high quality of life means, in part, living in a place with a strong sense of community and with vibrant social interaction. For that they depend on social software.

Your economic development department needs to be part of this reality. You need to be involved with your community and to encourage that community to create a buzz of economic vibrancy.

That’s the social dimension that is being added to the business of investment attraction. It manifests itself in the growth of social software including:

• Social networking — MySpace, Facebook and LinkIn are examples of services that give people social profiles and the tools to manage them;
• Social collaboration — It is increasingly vital to internet savvy professionals to be able to consult and collaborate with each other through tools such as wikis, blogs and instant messaging;
• Social media — These technologies can assist your community to build content repositories and share them among a network of identifiable interested parties. YouTube and Flickr are examples;
• Social validation — What’s the public assessment of your community’s economic strengths and the messages you are delivering? Find out through social rating and bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us.

What appears to be a quiet period in economic development is in fact a time of rapid change. When the recession ends and site selection activity resumes, evaluation methods will have a social dimension already built in.

Anya Codack, CEO
Phone: 416-977-9724 x 509
Fax: 416-642-1959
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