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Community Development - 2007 Issue 
Economic development used to be about going out and attracting a company, and pulling together incentive packages to land that company.  But that is not where economic development is going in the future.

 

The focus is shifting toward raising awareness of the uniqueness of each community and its ability to retain and attract talented people who will contribute to creating more economic opportunities.

A growing number of communities have realized that their development time and effort needs to be spent developing people-based business retention strategies at the same time as they continue with efforts to attract site developers.

More attention is being given to creating a community environment that provides a heightened quality of life and quality of place.  A high quality-of-life experience will be a significant factor in the attraction and retention of creative workers.

Urban theorist Richard Florida has noted that “access to talented and creative people determines where companies will choose to locate and grow, and this in turn changes the way cities can compete.” The theories of Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute, affiliated with the University of Toronto, have had a tremendous impact on the way cities and organizations look at shaping their economic futures. In an interview with Canadian Business magazine in 2008, Florida discussed how attracting and retaining members of the “creative class” creates economic advantage through the development of clusters of talent.

“The real clustering that matters is not the clustering of industries and firms and technologies,” he said.  “It’s the clustering of highly innovative people.

“The places that attract them are the really, really big winners. They grow more, they have more patents, they have more innovation, they have higher housing values, incomes and wages. It’s no longer that we can grow just by popping stuff out of the ground and using people in these mass production assembly lines. The growth of human capabilities is coincident with the growth of our economies.”

A best practice in economic development today is to help keep communities vibrant by working collaboratively to develop strategies to retain a productive work force in an attractive and sustainable environment.

This means that investment attraction marketing needs to include emphasis on natural amenities, recreation facilities, culture, festivals, sports, heritage, shopping, health care and education.

Information and communications technologies are important tools in developing and deploying such strategies.  Web-based applications can assist with delivering public information and helping to build consensus around a program, gathering and analyzing industry intelligence, conducting surveys, presenting podcasts and reaching out to communities of interest through social networks.

All in the name of invigorating a community’s economy - through motivating and rewarding the people who live there!

Anya Codack

Yfactor Inc.
www.yfactor.com

phone: 416-977-9724 x 509
fax: 416-642-1959
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Business Development - 2007 Issue 
by: Kamiel S. Gabriel, PhD, M.B.A., P.Eng.

Durham Region's Energy Cluster: A Case to Ponder  | Print | 
by: Kamiel S. Gabriel, PhD, M.B.A., P.Eng.

Over the past forty years, a vibrant energy cluster formed organically in Durham. From the establishment of the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station in 1965, community and industry participation in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) initiative, through to the 2003 launch of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) with a strong focus on energy and more recently with the establishment of the Durham Strategic Energy Alliance (DSEA) in 2005, energy-related industrial activity has grown steadily in Durham making it Ontario’s premiere energy industry cluster. Clusters as economic drivers

“Today’s economic map of the world is dominated by what are called clusters: critical masses – in one place – of unusual competitive success in particular fields. Clusters are not unique, however; they are highly typical – and therein lies a paradox: the enduring competitive advantages in a global economy lie increasingly in local things – knowledge, relationships, motivation – that distant rivals cannot match. Untangling the paradox of location in a global economy reveals a number of key insights about how companies continually create competitive advantage. What happens inside companies is important, but clusters reveal that the immediate business environment outside companies plays a vital role as well. This role of locations has been long overlooked, despite striking evidence that innovation and competitive success in so many fields are geographically concentrated.” .[1]
Clusters capture important linkages– technology, skills, information, marketing and customer needs – that cut across firms and industries. These linkages are fundamental to competition and the direction and pace of innovation. They help articulate the role of the private sector, government, trade associations, educational and research institutions. By bringing together firms of all sizes, they create a forum for constructive business-government dialogue and for identifying common opportunities. The wide-ranging networks of local actors clusters assemble are a rich source of information that provides guidance for both economic and social policy.
Moreover, clusters stimulate and enable innovation by enhancing local players’ ability to perceive innovation opportunities. The presence of multiple suppliers and institutions greatly improve the cluster’s proficiency at creating knowledge, while locally available resources make experimentation relatively easy.  They increase productivity and efficiency by providing easy access to specialized inputs, services, employees, information, institutions, and “public goods” (such as training programs). Coordination and transactions across firms is enhanced, and they encourage the rapid diffusion of best practices throughout the community.
They facilitate commercialization by making market opportunities for new companies and new lines of established business more apparent, clusters play an important role in facilitating commercialization. Because they aggregate a critical mass of locally available skills and suppliers available in the cluster, commercializing a new product or starting up/spinning off a new company become much easier to accomplish.
THE DURHAM REGION CASE
For a cluster to be considered viable, it must have achieved significant size and diversity of composition. Most essential elements in the industry value chain should be represented. The Durham energy industry cluster exhibits these characteristics: it includes companies involved in the generation, transmission and distribution of energy, as well as the service and equipment suppliers which support it. Its history and evolution – the intentional and serendipitous events that forged it – reaches back over four decades. During that time, strong intra-cluster relationships between firms have formed and built a strong core to the cluster.
Relationships have grown between firms and the region’s research infrastructure: in particular, Ontario Power Generation, and more recently, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT). These can be expected to spawn new research, development and ultimately, innovation and commercialization.  This has culminated in the emergence of local social capital and ‘civic entrepreneurs’[2] – in particular, the formalization of the DSEA, which was formed to build on the cluster’s inherent strengths, help it mature and turn its attention outward.
FACTOR CONDITIONS[3]
Across the range of factors, or input conditions, there is a strong presence of high quality specialized inputs available to firms. As the cluster grows and matures, the level of those inputs can be expected to increase:
Human resources: Durham College, UOIT, as well as other Ontario-based institutions ensure a steady supply of skilled professionals and tradesAdministrative infrastructure: there are 40 successful years of history across the administrative and managerial elements demanded by the energy industryInformation infrastructure: both specialized and general IT firms are present and active in the regionScientific and technological infrastructure: UOIT has added this previously missing, critical elementNatural resources: ready access to most natural resource inputs, including uranium Successful economic development is a process of successive economic upgrading, in which the business environment in the jurisdiction evolves to support and encourage increasingly sophisticated ways of competing[4]
To some degree, Durham enjoys all the elements Porter identifies as necessary for a viable cluster. Moreover, it aligns with his classic definition: an organic, naturally arising cluster. The Porter Model puts a strong emphasis on clusters of traded goods and services. This is a focus that Durham is now vigorously pursuing. Dynamic clusters are as dependent on strong local as strong global linkages: actively targeting exogenous markets not only reaps economic rewards, it invigorates the overall quality of the microeconomic business environment – ensuring the cluster evolves, grows and remains competitive and relevant.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
In its simplest definition, a cluster, according to Webster Dictionary, is:
“A number of similar things that occur together”.
For any successful cluster, as a minimum, the following two basic elements must be strongly present:
“A number of similar things”:  which strategists translate to “a united vision”.  To be a truly cohesive cluster is to have all stakeholders in the cluster motivated by the same vision, united on a course of action and devoted to work together to achieve this vision.  We tend to give this most elementary, but foundational step, many exotic titles such as Strategic Plan, Stakeholders Study, Regional Development Action Plan, etc.  But at its core, it is simply people who are passionately working together on a number of similar things.
The second part of the definition is equally important: “that occur together”.  It is important to have the same vision, but equally important is the method of deployment of this vision.  It must take place in some form of “togetherness”.  That is, it is not enough to have the right vision if each partner working on a different agenda to reach it!  It needs to be deployed with all partners working together for the same goal.
Durham is Ontario’s most well-developed and credible energy cluster. To achieve this, the Durham Strategic Energy Alliance (DSEA) was formed in May 2005 to become the focal point of the cluster. DSEA has established itself as the source of informed opinion with respect to energy issues in the province of Ontario. It has become a critical network node in Canada’s energy network and a vigorous, respected actor internationally.
Kamiel S. Gabriel, PhD, M.B.A., P.Eng.
Associate Provost-Research at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Durham Strategic Energy Alliance (DSEA).  Dr. Gabriel’s research work in the area of energy conservation and heat transport systems for terrestrial and non-terrestrial applications has earned him a US patent and several international awards. 
For more information on UOIT, please visit (www.uoit.ca)
For more information on the Durham Strategic Energy Alliance, please visit (www.dsea.ca)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1]Michael E. Porter, “Clusters and the new economics of competition” Harvard Business Review; Volume 76, Issue 6. Boston; Nov/Dec 1998. http://polaris.umuc.edu/~fbetz/references/Porter.html
[2] David A. Wolfe, Ph.D., “Policies for Cluster Creation: Lessons from the ISRN Research Initiative”, Program on Globalization and Regional Innovation Systems, Centre for International Studies, Innovation Systems Research Network, University of Toronto. Presentation to the Breakfast on the Hill Seminar Series, Centre Block, Parliament Hill, February 17, 2005.
[3] Laura Williams and John Male, “Durham Energy Industry Cluster Study”, Final Report, Disruptor, June 2006.
[4] Michael E. Porter, “Clusters and Regional Competitiveness: Recent Learnings”, Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, Harvard Business School, International Conference on Technology Clusters, Montreal, Canada, 7 November 2003. 

Business Development - 2007 Issue 
A Corporate Retreat: To Retreat or Not To Retreat - That is the Question
by Christine Corelli, Christine Corelli & Associates, Inc. 
A Corporate Retreat: To Retreat or Not To Retreat - That is the Question
by Christine Corelli, Christine Corelli & Associates, Inc.
Corporate retreats represent a significant investment of time and energy. Many companies refrain from holding them because they are regarded as time consuming, and, perhaps even a bit frivolous. However, conducted properly, they can be the best overall investment companies can make to make decisions to help move their companies into a more successful future.

Regardless of the size of your company, the bottom line is that bringing key people together for a retreat is a smart move. It can be an excellent opportunity for strategic planning, and to make decisions on what actions you need to take to increase your sales, establish higher levels of customer loyalty, improve overall performance, and drive business growth.

Effectively planned and executed, a retreat is also an excellent platform for reinforcing leadership skills, brainstorming ideas, solving problems, stimulating teamwork, nurturing a sense of camaraderie, and clarifying and reaffirming your organization's competitive strategy.

Corporate retreats are valuable experiences and they are fast becoming one of the most effective management tools a company can use. Since people tend to promote what they help to create, a carefully planned retreat will ensure that everyone in your organization will support corporate decisions.

The following are twenty one tips to assist you in planning a successful retreat.

21 Tips for planning a successful retreat…

1. Be clear on what you want your retreat to accomplish.

Specifically, answer these two questions--What has to happen to consider this corporate retreat a success? What specific issues or topics do you want to discuss?

2. Have the right people on your retreat team.

No more, no less. Remember, this is not a reward or a popularity contest. If youdon't have the right players, your retreat will not be productive. The next tip may help you to designate the retreat team.

3. Decide whether you want to invite only your executives or include your managers and a few key people to be on your retreat team.

Consider the benefits of including managers and few high-contributing employees. If you choose to do so, invite employees with strong leadership skills who possess an in-depth knowledge of the issues at hand so they can participate--even for a portion of your retreat agenda.

Prior to the event, ask them to poll their staff on the following issues/topics for discussion at the retreat. They will have great insight to bring to your retreat that provides input, shares ideas, and represents the voice of the people in their department. You'll be surprised at what you might learn.

What is our company doing exceptionally well?
What are you hearing from our customers?
What do you need from management to perform your job more effectively?
How can we improve teamwork, communication, and morale?
What ideas do you have to help the company move forward?
If there is one message you want management to hear, what would it be?
4. Name your employee team.

If you make the decision to invite just a few employees, give them a name, such as the "President's Advisory Team," or "Acme Leadership Council, or "Acme Future Leaders Council." It will demonstrate that you recognize their leadership ability and will make them feel important and appreciated.

5. Establish your objectives.

While every organization has its own unique challenges, the following are examples of areas for discussion that you might address:

What is our company doing exceptionally well?
What do our customers want, need, and expect from us?
How well do we deliver what our customers want, need, and expect?
What are our customers saying about us?
Do we deliver on our brand promise?
How are we perceived in the eyes of our industry and community?
What complaints do we hear from our customers?
What service flaws exist and how can we avoid or eliminate them?
How can we streamline our operations and cut red tape?
What processes or procedures do we have that don't make sense and hold us back from flawless execution?
What can we do to become the Number One preferred provider?
How can we help our sales force to generate more sales and establish higher levels of customer loyalty?
What new approaches can we take to our advertising and marketing strategies?
What are the trends occurring in the building and construction industry that will impact our decisions?
Where could we expand our business and tap into new markets?
What is the overall level of performance of our employees?
Do they act as our brand ambassadors?
Who are our highest contributors?
Who needs more coaching and skill development?
Who is not performing and may need more help or even be terminated?
What more can our employees do to better support our sales team?
Do our employees have the skills, tools, and training they need?
What, specifically, can we do to create higher levels of customer loyalty and turn our customers into advocates?
Where do we need improvement?
How can we take what we're doing right and use these to build on our strengths?
6. Set a tightly focused agenda.

Select no more than three topics for discussion; consider that most urgent issues. If you try to cover too much, in too little time, you will not be satisfied with the end result. Stay on track. Don't let anyone ramble on during discussions.

7. Provide materials for review.

Distribute copies of a great business book, (From Good to Great, by Jim Collins, or Wake Up and Smell the Competition are excellent choices) or a magazine article on future trends in your industry, advertising and marketing techniques, sales strategies, employee motivation, or any topic related to your most urgent needs. Ask attendees to review the materials prior to your corporate retreat to be able to share what they learned from it and how you can apply it to your company.

8. Bring information.

Before the management retreat, ask your team to gather new information or "intelligence" about your business and your competitors.

9. Keep it quiet.

Keep in mind that the Encarta World English dictionary defines a retreat as…
a period of quiet rest and contemplation in a secluded place . Or…
a period away from normal activities, devoted to contemplation

Whether you want to work together for three days, or you can only spare one day, the best place for your retreat is a quiet atmosphere far from the hustle and bustle of daily business. It doesn't have to be an expensive resort or a fancy country club – especially if you don't want your people looking out the windows and checking their watches because they're anxious to play golf. (If you do want to play golf or engage in another team building recreational activity, schedule it into your corporate retreat accordingly.)

10. Keep it simple and inexpensive if budget is a concern.

Money is not the key component in a successful retreat. Some highly productive retreats have even been held in an executive's backyard or at a quiet restaurant with a meeting room. Consider holding your retreat in a simple meeting room, or at a country bed and breakfast inn (with an appropriate private room for your sessions plus a dining room for breaks).

By way of example, a company located in Connecticut invited twelve of its top leaders to a special retreat at a quaint bed and breakfast located on a lake. Check-in was Friday morning and the first session was scheduled for Saturday morning. After a good dinner and a quiet restful evening, they all met early-- fresh and eager to begin the sessions, which were held in a quiet meeting room in the facility.

Although their managers had already been through an extensive leadership training program, the executive who organized the management retreat stated his position to the professional speaker he hired to kick-off and facilitate the retreat.

"We can never hear enough about leadership.
Let's kick off our management retreat with a reinforcement
of leadership skills."

The speaker delivered a program that would help reinforce their leadership skills. Her forty-five minute presentation was upbeat and highly interactive, because it is critical to maintain high energy levels and a great deal of involvement at any retreat for it to be successful.

Then, she conducted a corporate retreat team-building exercise, followed by a quick review on the team communication skills below to apply during their discussions.

Open communication
Monitor Communication – Inclusion, Clarification
Brainstorming-Idea Sharing
Decision Making
She instructed the retreat team to look at their company with the eye of an outside consultant. The corporate retreat team proceeded to work for six hours, including a working lunch and twenty-minute breaks. In the late afternoon, everyone was given some free time. Some napped; some played golf; some went walking in town. In the evening, a quiet dinner was held at a lovely restaurant. The rule at dinner was no business chat!

The next morning, discussions continued. Final decisions were made in the afternoon. Each team member was instructed to develop an action plan to make a strategy work.

11. Consider more options for your retreat format.

Some companies use this type of format:

Day One: Arrival is in the early afternoon, with an early dinner planned. During the dinner, teams of two, three, or four are formed, depending on how many people attend the retreat. Each team is given an assignment from one of the three areas you have selected for retreat discussion. They meet together for an hour to discuss the topic. Then, together, they create a 20-minute presentation that will include the following:

Your strengths
Your needs
Your challenges
One person is selected to deliver the presentation to the group. Many may want to use PowerPoint to make a better impact. Later that evening, your team reconvenes as a group and listens to the presentations.

Day Two: Discussions are conducted. Decisions are made and an action plan is developed.

Some companies have retreats that last an entire weekend. Whatever you decide, make sure it is an energizing experience for your corporate retreat team.

12. Consider engaging the services of a high-powered corporate retreat facilitator.

While it's possible for you, or anyone in your company, to conduct the retreat, you will often get better results if you bring in a business expert who is an experienced corporate retreat facilitator to provide ideas and accomplish your retreat goals. A retreat facilitator is neutral and can see conflicts/opportunities that your retreat team might not see and can share ideas from other companies.

An experienced corporate retreat facilitator is a strong communicator, keeps everyone focused, and knows how to read body language. He or she responds to what they see and hear. The facilitator knows how to obtain participation from every member of the group. Prior to your retreat, the expert will conduct research on your industry, talk to your customers, and consult with your company to identify issues and challenges and find out what is going on in your employees' minds. The facilitator will report the findings at the retreat and help you problem-solve.

Another good reason to bring in a facilitator is to ensure no single individual has to wear two hats. Past experience has proven that the company person should not have to worry about being both a facilitator and a participator.

An outside person will not be influenced by your management structure. In fact, a good facilitator will help you create ground rules for the retreat - the first being the next tip.

13. Everyone leaves their hats and their titles at the door.

At one executive retreat, the company president stated, "Okay, folks, at our last retreat you told me I needed to do a better job of communicating. How have I been doing lately?" How honest and forthright a statement coming from a top-level executive! The next rule follows.

14. No cell phones or e-mail communication during the retreat. If your corporate

retreat will be held during the week, set half-hour breaks for phone calls.

15. Use subtle background music to enhance creative-thinking.

Studies have proven that people think more creatively when classical music is playing in the background. Mozart, Vivaldi, Bach, can be superb choices. Just make sure the volume is low and the music is instrumental.

16. Refrain from rewards.

Never use a retreat to award someone. Your time must be spent on idea sharing and problem-solving.

17. Ensure that "follow through" is part of your retreat process.

When you conclude, be prepared to make final decisions and create assignments. Make sure expectations are clarified and that you analyze your results.

18. Evaluate.

Finally, ask for a candid evaluation from your participants. Make sure you include the question, “How can we improve our next retreat?” Determine whether they come away with what you had anticipated when the retreat was originally planned.

19. Execution is critical.

Make sure your entire corporate retreat team knows that

Going Back to "Business As Usual" Won't Cut it.
Execution Must Be Your Competitive Strategy

20. Retreat Repeatedly.

Many companies hold a yearly retreat, while others hold them quarterly, to make sure their leadership functions as a unified team and stays on track. Others hold a retreat just prior to an annual employee meeting. Still others hold them sometime in late fall or early winter, so they can put their strategy into place and make announcements early in the New Year.

21. Retreat now.

You'll be amazed at what you can accomplish at a corporate retreat if you've never held one, or if you've never held them in the right manner. Just keep this in mind: Holding a retreat doesn't have to be costly. Holding a retreat with the right structure, format, and facilitator is not an unnecessary expense, but an investment that is well worth making.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christine is best known as The Competitive Edge Expert, and the author of the popular books, "Wake Up and Smell the Competition" and "The ART of Influencing Customers to BUY From YOU". As a keynote speaker, conference speaker, and management retreat facilitator, she is superlative in her field. Her impressive client list includes Fortune 100 corporations, prominent national associations and literally hundreds of mid-sized and small businesses.

To learn more about Christine's books, keynotes, seminars or consulting, please contact: Gene Leigh, Director of Marketing: gene@christinespeaks.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or call us toll-free: (800) 417-9968 or (847) 581-9968

 

Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
Communities of all sizes in North America have discovered that their efforts to promote tourism as a pillar of economic development can gain a big advantage if they include culinary tourism among their offerings.
Since the turn of this century culinary tourism has become an industry within an industry, as statistics have revealed tremendous growth in the number of communities developing culinary tourism programs, and specialized organizations have sprung up to provide resources for such programs and develop best practices.

While tourism development organizations are fortunate to have these resources to build on, they should be guided by one overriding success factor – collaboration. A culinary tourism initiative cannot succeed without enthusiastic collaboration among the various organizations within the supply chain, with strong leadership usually provided by the tourism development or economic development organization. Collaboration is particularly essential to maintaining a high-quality website that promotes the program and is one of the most important factors in its success.

Key Concepts and Trends in Culinary Tourism
In its broadest sense, Culinary Tourism is defined as the pursuit of unique and memorable culinary experiences of all kinds, often while travelling, but one can also be a culinary tourist at home. In fact experience has shown that development of local awareness should be the first target for a culinary tourism program.

Culinary tourism is growing exponentially. Its leading authority, the International Culinary Tourism Association (ICTA, www.culinarytourism.org), reports that it has seen an enormous surge in recent years in the number of destinations exploring culinary tourism.

Yet this industry segment is not simple to organize – it does not consist merely of restaurants that can be grouped and listed. It encompasses cooking schools, cookbook and kitchen gadget stores, culinary tours and tour leaders, culinary media and guidebooks, caterers, wineries, breweries, distilleries, food growers and manufacturers, culinary attractions and more.

Furthermore, culinary travellers are not homogenous. Studies by the ICTA and other researchers have found that travellers who choose destinations based on culinary criteria span both genders, all age groups and all ethnic groups. Marketing activities in many cases must be carefully targeted to reach different market segments.

Culinary travelers generally have two things in common, however – higher incomes than generic tourists, and a tendency to spend more during their trips. It’s small wonder that more communities are trying to appeal to such travellers!

Culinary Tourism Programs
Communities embarking on a culinary tourism program need first to understand and identify all the complex elements of the regional food supply chain. One of the most important critical success factors is the creation of an inventory within the region. Understanding what is available is fundamental to building a successful program and packaging the products within it.

Programs typically combine:

Facilities such as farms
Activities such as visiting wineries;
Events such as food festivals;
Organizations such as hospitality and tourism associations.

A program can combine some or all of these elements but will often have a geographic component as well, such as a culinary trail, that serves both as a unifying element for the program and as the cornerstone for its branding.

The most important component of any culinary tourism program is the membership. It is critical for the economic development department – or any other designated leadership body for the program -- to locate, contact, and invite eligible establishments to participate in the culinary tourism program. All the links in the supply chain need to understand that they depend on each other, not just for supply but to support the brand and marketing strategy.

Culinary Tourism Websites
Culinary tourists are very likely—more so than generic tourists—to research and plan their trips online. The web’s multimedia and interactive capabilities make it the perfect medium to convey powerful and compelling stories to draw tourists to culinary businesses.

A culinary tourism website should be designed as a niche site that has its own distinctive appeal consistent with the brand of the community as a whole. It should incorporate the most important characteristics of tourism websites in general, as described earlier in this series (see “How Competitive Is Your Tourism Website?” published May 5, 2009):

The site must offer one-stop access to all culinary tourism products and absolutely must be kept up to date;
It must help visitors to make decisions about where they would like to go, based on their own situations and preferences;
It must be interactive, enabling visitors both to obtain answers to individual questions and to communicate with others about aspects of the culinary tourism program.

Social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter can be used. Integrating Google Maps into the website will make it easy for visitors to locate attractions and determine the best routes to reach them.

The design of the website should incorporate a search engine optimization plan, a linking strategy, and an online advertising program to drive traffic and ensure that the site appears high in search engine results for relevant keywords.

Other desirable features include an itinerary planner where tourists can organize their culinary experiences, a directory, advanced destination search capability, photo galleries and a press room.

Best Practices for Culinary Tourism
Partnerships – It cannot be overstressed that culinary tourism involves many players. There is a need for these players to share the most effective possible communication and networking. Partnerships need to be built with local organizations, including cultural and general business organizations, as well as with government organizations at higher levels that can provide significant resources.
Leadership -- Studies have revealed the importance of strong and effective yet collaborative leadership to the success of culinary tourism programs. Key roles for the leadership organization are to direct the execution of the culinary tourism strategy, act as the conduit for communication among stakeholders and partners, and provide links to other culinary tourism initiatives and resources at levels ranging from local to international.
Integration -- The development of culinary tourism should become part of the tourism strategy of a community. Successful culinary tourism programs ensure that services such as accommodation, shopping, recreational attractions and information services are readily available and promoted in a way that helps support the culinary tourism activities.
Financial support and performance measures -- Most culinary tourism products require a few years to become established and successful. They need long-term investment resources and financial plans. They also need to demonstrate success to their funding organizations by means of measurements such as revenues, additional spending by tourists, increased person-trips and the like.
Differentiation -- Culinary tourism programs should be distinctive to the region. The essence of culinary tourism is an emphasis on local products or local styles of cuisine that make the community’s experience unique for visitors.
Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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1-877-793-5016

 

Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
The web provides many advantages as a communications platform, but when you visit the websites of non-profit organizations around North America it is surprising to see how often those advantages are negated because the sites are not up to date.

An outdated website wastes the time of your visitors and undermines your organization’s credibility. It also directly affects your revenue. If events and campaigns are not publicized early enough and with appropriate frequency, participation will drop.

That these threats are frequently not addressed points to a universal management problem among NPOs – the lack of time on the part of staff and volunteers to update the website content. This arises often from bottlenecks created when web content is the responsibility of only a very few people, even in cases when the organization has multiple websites to manage across branches or regions.

A solution could be decentralized content publishing -- assigning responsibility for various content updating tasks to different people. But this solution might not always be the answer.

There are disadvantages to decentralized content publishing from a management point of view. The national organization does not want to find that many voices are representing the organization in many different ways.

Should a chapter publish incorrect information or inappropriate opinions, the national organization may find itself managing a public relations nightmare. Organization-wide branding is a key concern. So is managing the timing and consistency of messages across the organization.

Then there are costs to consider. Decentralized content publishing typically means that each chapter or regional office has its own website to manage. Often the costs of those sites – hosting, design, maintenance and support -- are managed at a local level and the national organization is not aware of the total impact. Duplication of effort becomes a serious financial issue.

Further, many of the business advantages of the web can be cancelled by a structure that engages multiple content authors to supply multiple websites. Chapters will invariably select different databases or formats, making it difficult or impossible to gather data for the entire organization and to run association-wide reports critical for decision making.

Common Platform, Common Workflow

The dilemma facing many NPOs, then, is whether to centrally manage the website content with the constant risk of it being outdated, or to assign responsibility for content to many authors with the risk of organizational disarray.

Fortunately there is a solution available that combines decentralized content publishing with a common management platform – a multi-site content-management system.

With this type of technology all sites, the national site and all chapters, can be operated from a single administration platform that incorporates easy publishing tools combined with restricted access management and workflow approval processes.

Simple tools let the organization’s communications manager quickly set up user rights by selecting the desired access level for any given user on any affiliated website. An integrated workflow approval process makes it possible for various people to be assigned different roles in the process, such as page creator, page reviewer or page publishers.

Chapters can be given total autonomy or some pages can be reserved for use by the national organization. This keeps consistency of messaging and branding in place while permitting local flexibility.

Staff or volunteers can update web content easily, using familiar editing tools. Content creation can be delegated to any number of individuals, with specific website areas assigned to people with appropriate expertise.

An effective multi-site content management system can reduce publishing times from weeks to minutes and remove many of the common bottlenecks encountered in typical publishing processes.

Do users of the system need to be technically savvy? No, but they do need basic communications skills and an understanding of best practices on the web – content writing principles, the importance of links and easy navigation, the principles of search-engine optimization and techniques for content creation that increase usability and user satisfaction.

The multi-site content management system should come with tools that support such best practices and the technology provider should be prepared to offer excellent training to the system users.

In summary, a multi-site content management system can be the technological solution that makes decentralized content publishing successful. It can enable non-technical users at each chapter to publish information themselves, using a common platform that promotes collaboration and permits the national organization to have the branding and messaging influence it needs.

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
A major reason why the web has become the predominant medium for destination marketing is that it permits a community to do far more than just cast a wide net of information and hope that it picks up some interested tourists. Today’s website technologies and social networking services combine to enables a destination to communicate interactively with highly targeted groups of potential visitors and even with individuals.
This explains the recent growth in the number and variety of themed tourism mini-sites. You might want to consider allocating some funds in your tourism promotion budget for building such mini-sites because they effectively fulfill the potential of the web, and make it increasingly easy for potential tourists to find what they want. That adds value to your message.

As noted in an earlier article in this series (“Directories and Itineraries for Tourism Websites,” Jan. 19, 2010), people visit tourism websites with personal goals in mind for their trip. Their choice of destination often depends on whether a site reveals desirable characteristics in a tourism offering.

Mini-sites take advantage of this personal-shopping aspect of the web by suggesting new ways for people to enjoy their vacations in keeping with their personal goals.

For a guide to how these ideas can be put into action you can examine the tourism strategy of the City of Enumclaw, Washington (pop. 11,470). The city is developing an ingenious strategy based on the brand, “Washington’s Equestrian Capital.”

The objective of the tourism strategy is “to use the unique brand for Enumclaw based on the equestrian-themed Expo Center as the lure to bring visitors to both the center and the town in general to engage in a concentrated rural atmosphere of activities and events, spend money and have a good experience.”

The strategy identifies and appeals to three groups: local visitors up to 30 miles away, day visitors to a distance of 60 miles and overnight visitors coming from a radius of 120 miles.

And the web? The Enumclaw strategy identifies it as a key marketing tool, with a website specific to the equestrian brand. It recommends the following characteristics and content for the site:

a. Organize it by interests and activities.
b. Make photographs compelling.
c. Draw in the viewer with:

Videos and podcasts
Opt-in e-newsletter
Press room
Printable activities guide and “best of” brochures and maps
Links to class registrations, hotels, dining.
It’s clear that Enumclaw understands how a themed mini-site can be used as a foundation for a successful tourism strategy. You can download the Enumclaw, WA Marketing Plan & Style Guide here.

Niche Marketing

Micro-, niche- or mini-sites can be the key to implementing niche marketing in a way that still reflects a cohesive, consistent brand. An outstanding example is www.traveliowa.com, the official tourism website of the State of Iowa.

This site, though unified by a modular design and the logo “Iowa Life/Changing,” is really a collection of mini-sites. It deliberately presents no generic information, but invites the viewer immediately to express personal preferences by clicking on topics according to a variety of criteria: location, timing, type of experience or specific destinations.

Pages devoted to vacation themes, such as Iowa’s history, are structured around maps and linked descriptions of attractions that fit that theme. Individual attractions are promoted by large rotating photos that link to in-depth sites with interactive capabilities such as ticket purchases. On all pages the viewer can consult an events calendar and express personal viewpoints using Facebook or Twitter or RSS feeds. This is a site that invites visitors to dig deeply into their own preferences to make their vacation plans.

Mini-sites can serve any number of purposes within a tourism strategy. They can guide tourists through activities related to hobbies, historical figures and places, music, local products and special events. They can effectively promote initiatives that would be difficult to present comprehensibly in any other medium.

The Town of Markham, Ontario, for example, has an innovative festival every August called Doors Open Markham. It is an annual showcase of the community's historical and architectural heritage sites involving many institutions, historic buildings, heritage homes and private gardens. How can such a multi-faceted event be marketed in a bite-sized package? The answer is a mini-site, www.doorsopenmarkham.ca, that captures the spirit of the event while serving the key function of tourism websites – to answer viewers’ questions.

These examples demonstrate that a single tourism website does not need to be all things to all people. It can serve as a gateway to mini-sites designed for specific purposes and to appeal to audiences that your community wants to target in its destination marketing strategy.

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
Why are municipal tourism websites proliferating in North America and becoming ever more creative and technically sophisticated? Because they are recognized as one of a community’s most important economic development tools.

Many communities, especially in small to mid-sized population regions, have turned to tourism as a way to combat declines in traditional industries. The economic impact of municipal tourism promotion reaches deeply into the community, increasing the growth and retention of tourism operators and the spill-over effect of tourism spending, which is re-invested throughout the community.

Dollars spent developing tourist attractions and promotions can bring significant returns. Research in the Province of Ontario, Canada, by its Ministry of Tourism shows that every $1 million spent by visitors generates $553,400 in wages and salaries.

Websites are the first place that tourists go to find places to go and things to do. The impact of the web on tourism success was explored in an earlier series of Tech Trends articles, under the heading “The New Face of Tourism Promotion” (May 5-26, 2009). To summarize the trend succinctly, we can simply quote TravelWeekly magazine: “Google is the new travel agent.”

And of course a travel agent provides interactive communication. So a website that functions merely as an online brochure will not satisfy today’s travel consumers. Modern tourism websites compete by employing such tactics as:

In a difficult economic climate, an economic development organization must invest its money wisely and obtain a return on that investment. When it comes to building or improving a website, your budget should address two factors:

Providing one-stop, real-time tourism sites that enable buyers to investigate, and plan their trips online;
Posting stories, written by tourists, about various activities and destinations they have explored;
Making use of online interactive marketing by posting or linking to video and photo sharing collections, blogs, social networking sites and consumer ratings.
Another important trend arises from the realization that tourists do not necessarily come from far away. Often they are interested to know what’s available in their own neighborhoods for a weekend getaway. Tourism websites need to cater to a variety of audiences including local visitors, regional visitors and out-of-the-country visitors.

To turn website visitors into visitors to your municipality, your tourism website should offer practical trip-planning tools including:

Searchable directory of attractions, accommodations, activities;
Event calendars;
Lots of fresh content about things to see and do, including testimonials and third-party commentary;
Lots of photos and videos;
Extra promotion of primary area attractions;
Ability to create itineraries and view maps.
For an excellent look at how these ideas can be put into action you can visit Durham Tourism (http://www.durhamtourism.ca), the colorful and attractive website of the Economic Development and Tourism Department of Durham Region in south-central Ontario.

This site invites interaction by visitors on every page. There are links everywhere. Visitors can click just once to find travel guides, photos, videos and the tourism department’s Facebook page. Information throughout the site can be bookmarked and linked to a wide variety of social-media services, helping to build a community of interest centered in Durham Region.

For people unfamiliar with Durham Region or who live some distance away, there are sections of the Durham Tourism site labeled in a user-friendly manner about “Things To Do”, “Places To Stay” and “Where To Eat”, with introductory information and lists of tourism products arranged by categories of experience. For those looking for entertainment and activities, there’s a comprehensive events calendar, links to local festivals and special events, and an “Explore Durham” blog by a travel writer talking about nature, culture, history and food in Durham Region – and a long list of other bloggers who respond and contribute their own home views.

The site has other imaginative ways to keep viewers engaged: a link to a computer desktop calendar that provides a new wallpaper image of Durham Region every week; registration for a Durham “Smarthost” discount card with exclusive offers, promotions and discounts for tourism products; a “Go Green” page with top 10 tips on how to organize environmentally friendly events – reflective of the Durham tourism motto of “Good Natured, Good times.”

It’s clear that Durham Region understands how the web can be used as a promotional foundation for tourism. Does your community have a website to compete with one like this?

In the next few articles we will explore some of the current web tactics for bringing tourists to town.

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
The job of an economic development department is to increase the tax base by attracting and facilitating business growth. Why does the department need an investment attraction website to do this?

How can the department justify an investment in developing or enhancing a website, when funds for new initiatives are so hard to come by? In other words, what is the ROI?

The answer lies in articulating the critical role of economic development, realizing the unique tasks that can be supported by a website to carry out that role, and then evaluating the success of your site in supporting those tasks.

Advantages and Risks

First of all, economic development expenditures are justified by the need for a community to expand its tax base and re-invest in the quality of life for all who live there. An increased tax base is made possible by new and/or expanding businesses. They enable a community to sustain itself over the long term, providing jobs for families and for the children of those families.

A positive spiral of growth and a vibrant community are the result.

Communities that do not invest in economic development risk the opposite. Young people will leave such communities to find education and work in larger urban centres. Businesses won’t locate in these communities, as there is a lack of available educated labour force. The result is a downward spiral and a dying community.

Attraction of business investment is a fiercely competitive activity. Success requires a layered process of analysis and strategy development (See “Defining Website Goals,” October 27, and “Hitting Your Targets,” November 10).

An economic development website should be carefully planned to meet internal and external goals within the municipal strategy. But planning is one thing; spending is another. To justify website expenditures it is necessary to show why the site is uniquely valuable.

An Enabler, Not a Product

The first thing to remember in making a business case is that the website is not a product that the economic development department is offering. It is not an end in itself. But it enables your department to achieve its goals in ways that other media and other activities cannot.

In the context of how site selectors operate today, the economic development website is the only medium that can effectively support four critical tasks:

Taking your community out to the world. Messages developed by the economic development organization must appeal to the creative class and should center on place-making, so that the community is seen by a network of interested people as having a distinct character and a high quality of life. No other medium can do this like the web.

Getting on a site selector’s shortlist. Site selection is a process of elimination. Research shows conclusively that the majority of research to build a site selectors’ shortlist is conducted on the web. If your website doesn’t do the initial talking for you, you won’t have a second chance.

Winning the investment. Personal contacts and visits are still indispensable, but site selectors depend extensively on your website to assist in the information verification process and provide answers to second and third rounds of questions before making the final investment decision.

Retaining and expanding businesses. The web is an increasingly important business retention tool. Interactive features available with today’s technology, including social media, give the web unique capability to reach out to existing businesses, demonstrate the community’s continuing business value, and create a strong community brand and pride of place.
In presenting a business case for web investment, your argument must focus on the capabilities of a high-quality website to help your department accomplish the tasks above.

Remember that the job is not accomplished by the website, but by people in your department using it as a tool. Accountability must be built into any plan for a powerful economic development website. Measurable goals must be established, and results must be continuously evaluated.

Lastly, expenditures must be planned realistically to take into account how a modern website can be an enabler for your department. Forthcoming articles will examine best practices for setting website budgets.

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
A successful website plan begins at the strategic planning level of the organization. A layered process of analysis leads like a funnel to the strategy that serves to guide the website’s goals (see “Defining Website Goals,” October 27, 2009).

Once you have the strategy in hand, however, two questions remain: how can you define your website’s goals most effectively, and how can you know if you have succeeded in meeting those goals?

These questions relate to the often difficult problem of demonstrating ROI. Many economic development websites are difficult to evaluate, and investment is difficult to justify, because there are no defined goals, and because measurement and tracking of statistics is often neglected.

You can justify website investments by pointing to the achievement of goals both externally and internally. If you find that your goals are not achieved, this does not mean necessarily that there has been no return on investment – rather, it is an opportunity to improve that return:

First examine whether your methods and execution could be improved.
Then examine the goals themselves – are they realistic, and do they most effectively implement your strategy as shown by experience? A regular cycle of evaluating both your website results and goals leads to continuous improvement.
External Goals

There are three types of external goals you should try to achieve in planning a website for investment attraction:

1. Inquiries and leads
You will want to be able to point to concrete results from your efforts. Set measurable goals for such concrete results as part of your planning. To generate inquiries and leads from your target audiences, build a site that:

Establishes branding;
Provides a showcase for as much information as possible relevant to your target audiences;
Provides the ability to interact with prospects through online media;
Provides access to contact information so prospects can have questions answered promptly.
2. Attention and admiration
The appearance of your website should be distinctive and a source of pride to your community. This has much more than skin-deep significance. First impressions are extremely important; an unattractive site can lose a visitor in less than a second. Do people compliment you on how good your site looks? Has it won awards or been cited by knowledgeable people as exemplary? Set goals and keep records of such activity – the buzz you create today might come back to you in the form of a phone call in six months.

3. Network activity
Economic development today is focused on raising awareness of the uniqueness of each community and its ability to retain and attract talented people who will contribute to creating economic opportunities. The web is an ideal medium for people-based strategies that market your community for its high quality of life and quality of place. An important goal of your website, then, is to take advantage of modern, measurable tactics, including social media, to generate inquiry and comment about your community from a network of engaged people.

Internal Goals

A well-planned economic-development website will serve as an enabler for your department as well as a business attracter. It will help your department perform better and contribute to the professional growth of your staff. This can be achieved if you set three kinds of internal goals:

1. Service excellence
What happens when web visitors interact with your staff? Are they satisfied with the information they receive? Do they take next steps? Your website should help you to evaluate whether your department is achieving its goals for service excellence.

2. Efficiency in communication
Modern websites save time and money in communications. Set goals for reduction in time spent updating the site with information, in creating new messages and in responding to inquiries. This is an effective way to present an ROI case to senior management.

3. Improvements in workflow
Similarly, a well-planned website will simplify user management and workflow processes. It will enable fast and easy retrieval of information and sharing of information among staff and departments. Your goals can then include productivity improvements that enable your staff to spend more time with clients and less with administrative chores.

Defining and measuring goals, evaluating your results and adjusting for continuous improvement is a best practice that is sometimes overlooked in an EDO’s demanding day-to-day tasks. However, making this activity part of a disciplined routine will result in intelligent feedback and the ability to determine website ROI, which can be invaluable for keeping stakeholders and funders informed about your progress.

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
Your website is the landing place for the prospects that you are trying to reach and to impress. It is the first source that site selectors use for identifying candidate communities. Making sure that your website is successful is essential!

We sometimes think of the website in isolation. A website can seem to be a world of its own, where rapidly changing technologies and expanding capabilities require specialized expertise to plan effectively.

But to develop a truly powerful economic development website, the place to start is not the site itself – after all, it is the economic development organization and the strategic goals of the organization itself, which the site is meant to serve.

Unfortunately many websites are built reactively, not proactively, without much thought to how they will help achieve strategic goals. It is quite possible for a site to be attractive and technically sound without being successful.

Question:
Where does a successful website plan begin?

Answer:
At the economic development organizations strategic planning level: Several big steps before the job of developing the website itself!

Step 1: The Economic Development Strategy
No small feat in and of itself, the economic development organization develops a multi-year strategy to optimize opportunities for business investment attraction. During this process overarching goals for the organization become apparent. To achieve these goals a marketing strategy is then developed.

Step 2: The Economic Development Marketing Strategy
Now research is conducted to define differentiation and messaging. Tactics, programs and campaigns are developed to work towards achieving the previously defined strategic goals. Marketing tactics at this level include both traditional print/media and online marketing objectives and tactics.

Step 3: The Economic Development Internet Strategy
The Internet strategy supports the marketing strategy by identifying how the website and other Internet-related tools such as e-mail and web 2.0 platforms can be applied to achieve the goals defined in the economic development strategy.

Step 4: The Website
Throughout this layered process, the goals defined at the start by the economic development strategy are consistently interpreted and applied to each type of marketing activity. By the time the website is developed, the goals are clear and the website can be put to work to meet goals, answer all standard site selection questions as well as communicating differentiation and messaging, focusing on specific strengths and making the desired first impression.

As noted in an earlier article in the Tech Trends series, “Tips and Tactics for Measuring Results,” (March 24, 2009), an important best practice in investment attraction is to analyze stats to determine what works for your community and what doesn’t.

Today’s websites need to lift a heavy load: balancing look and feel, messaging and positioning, first impression, information completeness and timeliness as well as valuable interactive features -- all targeted at attracting investment in specific sectors or reaching out to identified target groups, such as the creative class.

By aligning your website with your strategic goals, you are much more likely to produce a website that will be effective for investment attraction and measurably successful!

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
Economic Development communications programs require not only a focus on investment attraction, but also on stakeholder communications. To visualize the process, think of your Economic Development Organization as the central point in a figure 8.

On one side you need to communicate with your internal stakeholders, the funding organizations and the political, administrative, community and business leaders who need to understand the activities of your organization. On the other side you need to communicate with prospects, attract investment and generate leads.

In both cases, communications go out and, due to the nature of the Internet and two-way communications channels, statistics and feedback come back in to your department. The figure 8 represents the feedback loops. Using web statistics, you can measure how well each loop is performing and disseminate relevant information to the opposite loop.

External Feedback Loop

The primary function of an investment-attraction website is to attract leads by means of interactive communications.

As noted in an earlier article in the Tech Trends series, “Tips and Tactics for Measuring Results,” (March 24, 2009), an important best practice in investment attraction is to analyze stats to determine what works for your community and what doesn’t.

Key performance indicators should be established to help you measure the return on investment of your website and of your marketing tactics.

How many people come to your investment attraction website on a daily basis?
How many pages do they go to on their visit?
What are the most popular pages?
What search terms did they use to find you?
How many of them fill out forms to ask for more information?
If you send out an e-mail blast or a news release or participate in social media, what impact does that have on your website traffic?
Real time web statistics tools provide this information. But it’s up to you to make it a priority to look at them and make decisions based on the results that you are getting.

By analyzing such data you can track how well the website is performing as a lead-generation medium – and then provide relevant statistics back to your internal stakeholders through the second communications loop!

Internal Feedback Loop

Your department must have buy-in from leaders of your municipality and community for the brand you have adopted, and the strategies and tactics you are using to attract investors and site selectors. Buy-in is rooted in relationship management, and that means communication. Your stakeholders need to be advised of progress, consulted and heard. Many economic development campaigns fail because they don’t maintain the backing of public leaders.

In turn, local information should be gathered from these groups in the form of surveys, collection of local information, news or announcements. Your website can be used to gather this information by inviting stakeholders to share their successes with you.

Their successes and their announcements can then be used to strengthen your external communications: use this information and put it back out on your investment attraction website!

All of this can be accomplished by positioning your investment attraction website as the centre of two related information loops, and using statistics as the litmus test for testing the success of initiatives in which everyone has a share.

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
Too often a list of data substitutes for information that could give site selectors a true understanding of the business dynamics of a community.

Make It Visually Interesting!

Data should be presented whenever possible in eye-catching ways that engage the viewer. Generous use of photos can go far to enliven a page of dry information. Are you showing lists of schools or businesses, for example? Illustrating those page with photos will bring your data to life for the viewer.

Visually enhanced graphs are many times more interesting and communicate strengths faster than a table does. Pie-charts, graphs or illustrative display of data can be bright, elegant or colourful and is much more memorable than a list of numbers in a chart.

Going further, you can help the viewer to put data in context by relating it to places and things in your community. With today’s web technologies you can present thematic mapping of demographic variables to show their spatial distribution and concentrations across a geographic area. For example, thematic mapping of population, income, retail spending and workforce characteristics can show the highest and lowest levels of these variables at various places within a community.
Visitors to search-friendly websites are able to select a data category, then a specific variable, then the number of groups for which the demographic variable will be shown on the map. Based on these selections the distribution of demographic concentrations is shown as a series of colours on the map interface.
In short, if you present data in ways that engage the viewer, they will dig deeper into your site and stay longer – and emerge with a favorable first impression of your community.

Make Data Work For You!

The data on your investment-attraction website doesn’t have to just sit there. You can use it to your advantage in reaching out to your audiences.

Remember that, in the era of Economic Development 2.0, the name of the game is to build a community of interest by means of frequent communications using a variety of online channels. Your data can work for you by being the focus of those communications.

When gathering and analyzing economic-development data you will spot statistics that are favorable to your community. Those are hooks! You can use them as the basis for news releases, blogs, videos, podcasts or any way you prefer to attract attention and draw traffic back to your site.

You can also use your website to create real-time data that is unique to your community. Survey-creating tools empower you to gather information and opinions on topics of interest to people and businesses. Your visitors can submit their thoughts on quick polls and see the results immediately, giving them an immediate connection to your community’s economic pulse.

Another best practice is to survey your business community regularly about what they’re doing, what is working for them, what markets they’re in, their growth expectations and so forth. All such information can be shared right back with the community through your investment-attraction website, increasing the attractiveness and stickiness of the site.

It’s also critical to remember the power that data can have when distributed through social media. Economic Development departments can now share data about their communities with their entire online network, across any number of social networking environments including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Digg. Property, demographics, consumer expenditures, business and labor force data can be designed for visual interest and distributed with a focus on making the network aware of key advantages.

So don’t just let that report sit there. Identify the key data, visually enhance it and get the key messages out to your network of interest today!

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
How easy or how frustrating a website experience is, is generally determined by how easy or how frustrating the navigation of a website is.

User-friendly navigation tools are more than a matter of aesthetics. To an economic development professional, it can mean the difference between attracting leads and being passed over – even if you don’t know that a visitor has come and gone.

Your investment-attraction website is competing with many others at all times. The majority of initial research by site selectors is done online. Such searches are anonymous, of course, so you will never know who is considering your community and evaluating it. If your website doesn’t do the initial talking for you, you won’t have a second chance.

Site selectors typically look at hundreds of websites at the beginning of their process of elimination to compile short lists. This is much different than practices of eight or nine years ago, before Internet research came to dominate in this field. At that time site selectors may have looked at a couple of dozen potential locations. Today your competition is much wider and stronger.

In addition, the length of time for an initial search has shortened to four to eight weeks from six months or more. This means that economic development professionals need to be ready and armed with more information at all times so they can address initial search criteria of site selection professionals and respond to requests for details immediately.

Failure to find the information you have provided will cause those searching for prospective locations to simply move on. There are plenty of websites that are able to quickly deliver the necessary information required to meet demanding deadlines.

What are the tools you can put in place to ensure an enjoyable navigational experience?

Content Architecture

To begin with, you will need a well-planned content architecture to communicate with today’s unforgiving audiences. Following best practices, the architecture needs to incorporate all necessary information and organizes this information into logical and practical sections, enable information to be found as easily as possible. This might sound complicated but it’s not.

An architecture is essentially a content plan. It can be envisioned as an organizational chart in the shape of a pyramid, with building blocks, or boxes, representing web pages and lines connecting the boxes to show how a visitor would move from one page to the next.

The challenge of constructing the architecture is to make sure that the boxes contain the right information, and enable the functionality that will best serve the mandate of the organization and the needs of your prospects for finding key information easily and quickly.

This article is concerned with the lines between the boxes – moving visitors around the website. It has to be simple, quick and intuitive if you are to meet the demands of impatient site selection professionals!

Search

More than half of your website visitors are “search dependent”. That is, they will look for the search bar and use it as their primary means for finding specific information on your website.

It is vital to provide a search tool that delivers the information your visitors are likely to want without delay. There is nothing more frustrating than poor search results that fail to produce expected links.

Seventy-five per cent of the searches conducted by your visitors will consist of one or two words. Given the industry sectors you are trying to attract, what are those words most likely to be? Anticipate the kinds of searches your website visitors will conduct and ensure that you have relevant content available for them; fresh, relevant content that is!

Breadcrumbs

In the story of Hansel and Gretel, breadcrumbs were used by the children to find the way home. In the same way, breadcrumbs are a tool; a series of links, at the top of a web page, that help visitors navigate the website or find the way back home.

Breadcrumbs typically appear horizontally across the top of a web page, usually below title bars or headers. They provide links back to each previous page the user navigated through to get to the current page. Breadcrumbs provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting or entry point. Typical breadcrumbs look like this.

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
Do you use Twitter? Do you wonder sometimes about the phenomenal growth of this micro-blogging website (http://twitter.com) and whether it might hold a lesson for economic development?

Here’s a statistic that qualifies to be the envy of anyone trying to promote economic growth: during June 2009, Twitter attracted 44.5 million unique users worldwide, an increase of 1,460 per cent from the previous year.

Now, what makes Twitter tick? All it does is give people a quick way to ask and answer the question, “What are you doing now?”

Therein lies the connection with economic development and investment-attraction websites. The Twitter phenomenon reflects a growing expectation among people who use the web for information – and that certainly includes site selectors – that they will find something new, something NOW, when they go online.

And not just new data or facts – new things about what people are doing, what’s happening in their community, who has opinions or insights into what’s happening, who knows where the good times are.

Twitter, you see, is a social network about now. There are many varieties of such networks, growing rapidly on social-media sites on the web. They serve, and build, communities. They foster relationships. And there is a fundamental reason why your investment-attraction website needs to do the same.

The creative entrepreneurs and professionals who are building and locating the businesses of tomorrow are attracted to places that foster vibrant social interaction and a high quality of life. They interact constantly through devices and consume content at a fast pace.

Does your website appeal to this creative class? Not likely unless it conveys a sense of NOW. In the past, publishing periodic information with statistics on population, transportation infrastructure or work-force education levels was sufficient to attract the attention of businesses. But to attract the attention of people -- creative, innovative, business-building people – you need more, and your investment-attraction website has to be up to the task.

Technology Tools to Do the Job

A good craftsman needs good tools. To manage a modern, busy website it is important to have the right software tools.

If you don’t have the right tools, your site cannot keep up with today’s expectations. If all changes you need to make have to go through the bottleneck of a webmaster, IT department or the external web provider, even simple updates or deletions just can’t happen at the speed of “NOW”.

Your site must be a showcase for your community’s competitive advantages and the center of a network of social activity that is all about NOW. A solid technical foundation is one of the things you need to make this happen.

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
If there is one word that best describes the evolution of the web from the user’s perspective during the past decade, that word is “interactivity.” People using the web no longer passively accept information published by others. Everyone can be a publisher now. Countless people have eagerly embraced the opportunity to have a voice on the web, to the point where whole industries have been transformed.

Take the travel industry. When you set out to select a vacation hotel in a new destination, how do you determine the quality of the experience you can expect? A common method is to search through blogs and social-media sites for comments from travelers who have stayed in that location. That competitiveness factor didn’t exist a decade ago but is a game-changer today.

When web users – including site selectors -- are presented with information, particularly in an advocacy context, they expect to be able to respond in some way. They want to pass the information around, comment on it, test it, see where it might lead.

How can you take advantage of the modern web’s interactive capabilities to add value to your investment-attraction website for visitors and for your community?

Encouraging visitors to answer questions or express opinions is an effective way to establish communication and engagement. Invite them to comment on articles or events, or respond to surveys on business issues and view the survey results right away. You may be surprised when you attract participation from potential investors in places you would not otherwise reach. You will also be able to demonstrate the involvement of people in your community, its business activities and enhance your search-engine rankings in the process.

A great example about how much people love to participate in their community through the web, is available at www.uwishunu.com. This site is part of the City of Philadelphia’s long-term strategy to entice more people to live, visit or start a business there.

Written by a diverse group of Philadelphians, uwishunu (pronounced “you wish you knew”) was created by the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation to give people around the world an insider’s look at the Philadelphia scene. Contributors are obviously passionate about their City; the site contains scores of blogs as well as uncountable numbers of photos and videos and reviews of everything that’s happening. The information can readily be distributed all over the social-media world. Certainly is an inviting interactive site for the creative class!

The lesson to be learned from observing these developments is that the web has become more than a communications vehicle – it is a vehicle for sharing, for support in decision-making, for generating engagement and building relationships. For all these reasons your investment-attraction site should promote interactivity as much as possible. Interactivity means business!

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
Your investment-attraction strategy probably includes reaching out to specific audiences. For that purpose the Internet provides new opportunities to reach more people in target niche sectors than any other kind of marketing ever has.

Today, messages can be segmented to go to people who self-identify based on what information they search for. You do not have to guess or hope that recipients are interested in what you have to say – you already know. This makes for very cost-effective marketing, something that is top of mind to economic developers in these times.

Self-Selection Through Search
People reveal on the web what they are interested in by the keywords they enter for searches. Today’s web products and techniques can use those keywords to bring your organization into the direct line of vision of the searcher.

A Google Adwords campaign, for example, can be extremely narrowly targeted. Not only can you determine the geography and other parameters for where and when your ad will be served. Most importantly, you can insert keywords into your Google ads that are designed to match the terms that people would enter if they were to search for the kinds of business opportunities your community provides. Your ad will appear on the results pages found by these qualified viewers. You have reached your defined niche and not merely scattered your message to the world at large.

Web 2.0 Niche Marketing
Similarly you can reach very specifically targeted niches through social media groups. Suppose you municipality has decided it wants to attract agricultural or financial or high-tech industries. Further narrowing the focus, you may have identified greenhouse growers or credit unions or video producers. Can the web help you to reach those narrowly defined industries? Yes, by using social-media channels.

You can create relationships and build a following by defining your interest and proving your expertise through your involvement with narrowly targeted interest groups through YouTube channels, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups and many other channels that are proliferating and becoming more robust as you read this.

Segmented Target Email
An old-fashioned technique, direct mail marketing, is still powerful if it is applied to the Internet through segmented e-mail marketing.

E-mail is a quick and inexpensive way to distribute information. Many economic developers use e-mail to stay in touch with their communities, provide valuable information to prospects, reach new target customers and create relationships with vendors, suppliers and others in the investment-attraction chain.

The challenge, as was always the case with direct mail, is to provide the right information to the right recipients. The Internet gives you the advantage of knowing that the recipients are interested in your messages, since they will have signed up to receive them. But still there is a list-management job to do.

You will need to tag your lead database (CRM) by niche sector and then segment your mailing list. You will also need to create content that is of interest to the niche target audience. Effective segmentation makes it easy to send customized email to specific niche sectors, providing information that they will respond to.

Today’s online tactics for targeting narrow niche audiences provide economic development professionals with a set of tools that were simply never available before. It is now possible to be interactive and involved with your narrowly defined target audiences, rather than broadcasting to an entire sector. That’s the spirit of what we call Economic Development 2.0.

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
Municipalities are responding to new economic and demographic realities by building local economies through culture. Creativity and culture are powerful drivers in building local economies and strengthening quality of life.

Attracting People with Culture
The field of investment attraction today is focused on attracting jobs in a knowledge-based economy. Municipalities are working to regenerate downtowns and build healthy neighborhoods so they can market themselves as livable and environmentally sustainable. They know that places that offer lively cultural and entertainment options are magnets that attract and retain creative people. This creative workforce in turn generates wealth.

Culture, then, is a primary measure of economic attractiveness. People are not secondary assets that follow business and investment. For communities that position themselves as places where people want to live and work, business and investment follows people.

Culture is now commonly referred to as the “fourth pillar” of sustainability along with social, economic and environmental aspects of economic development. Its importance is growing with the impact of immigration (see “Marketing to New Immigrants” in this series). People searching the web for economic opportunities want to know at a glance where the resources specific to their cultural group are located within a community.

Does your investment-attraction strategy include promoting your community’s culture? Are you able to succinctly present cultural information in a way that will draw the interest of site selectors, investors, entrepreneurs and creative people?

If not, you might consider the use of cultural-mapping technologies. Cultural mapping is a systematic approach to identifying and recording a municipality’s cultural resources usually using geographic information systems (GIS).

Using GIS to Map Your Cultural Assets
GIS tools enable the presentation of demographic data by graphical means – using charts, graphs and maps that can present a picture that is easily understood without the need for lengthy explanatory texts. Maps are especially helpful to put data in context. Viewers can click on detailed maps and call up relevant data on such matters as transportation, taxation, city planning and more.

A viewer can define the community (and property) characteristics important to his or her search, and the cultural-mapping technologies can find and display locations that are a match. The result is a faster process of site-selection analysis.
A site can incorporate thematic mapping of demographic variables to show the spatial distribution and concentration of specific variables across a geographic view. For example, thematic mapping of population, income, retail spending and workforce characteristics can show the highest and lowest levels of characteristics within a community. They can be shown as a series of colors on the map interface and thus can be grasped effortlessly by the viewer.
Cultural mapping is an example of how technology has made great strides in streamlining the initial stages of a search, and in helping economic development departments to stay abreast of economic and demographic trends.

Communities that post relevant site-selection information online, in readily accessible formats, can save searchers weeks of time. Cultural mapping using GIS makes it easy to get a feel for the characteristics of a community around a site under consideration. A modern site search still requires site visits and work on the ground before a final decision, but a community increases its chances for consideration if it provides searchers with information they can visualize and analyze in their offices before starting to make calls.

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
In the decade to come, the number of workers reaching retirement age will be several times the number entering the work force. This will affect communities all over North America. Immigration will be vital to maintaining a workforce that can sustain economic prosperity, but immigrants are drawn overwhelmingly to large cities. What can mid-sized or small communities do to attract the immigrants they will need?

They can do what a number of large cities are already doing: identify the communities they wish to attract and draw them to their websites to explore economic-development opportunities.

Simple tips include:

•Welcoming them and providing information in multiple languages
•Providing useful information specifically valuable for new immigrants
•Making it easy to find the new immigrant information section on the website

They can also take steps to make their sites stand out from the pack by adding interactive tools and extending their messages out to immigrant communities.

Be Welcoming to New Immigrants!
The first step is to serve notice that your community is serious about welcoming an immigrant work force. For an example you can look to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Philadelphia has realized that immigrants have made up for the population loss that resulted from middle-class whites and blacks departing for the suburbs. Now it has become one of the top 10 US metropolitan areas for immigrant men business owners.

It has done so with the help of a website called The Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians, www.welcomingcenter.org/immigrationPA/economic.php. It connects newly arrived individuals from around the world with the economic opportunities that they need to succeed. Since opening in 2003, the site has assisted more than 4,000 clients from 70 countries to understand how to obtain health care, education, get around in the city, find a job, start a business, bank, pay taxes and much more.

Target Immigrant Women Entrepreneurs
Immigrant women start businesses, too. They comprise one of the fastest-growing groups of business owners in North America. This fact is well recognized in the Region of Durham, Ontario, east of Toronto on the north shore of Lake Ontario, where the mayor and council of the Town of Ajax proclaimed May 2009 as South Asian Heritage Month at the request of a not-for-profit group called Community Economic Development for Immigrant Women.

The group’s website, www.ced4im-wo.org/index.html, is designed to help train, match and promote the skills of immigrant women and small business entrepreneurs by exploring the business opportunities that exist within Durham Region. It is one reason why immigrants are choosing Durham as their second home after landing in Toronto.

Make it Easy to for New Immigrants to Integrate
In the City of Red Deer, Alberta, www.MovingToRedDeer.ca provides a regional one-stop shop for potential immigrants, newcomers, and businesses with foreign workers who want to obtain information on topics including housing, education, language services, healthcare, and the cost of living in the Red Deer region. The site has helped produce an increase in attraction and retention of new labour for the region and reduce its critical labour shortage.

Atlanta and other communities in Georgia have benefited from the state’s Entrepreneur Friendly program, which includes a section of its economic development website devoted to women, minorities and youth, www.georgia.org/BusinessInGeorgia/SmallBusiness/WomenMinoritiesYouth/Pages/default.aspx. Georgia leads the US in entrepreneurship, according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, and its fastest-growing business segments are women and minorities.

The Province of British Columbia, Canada, has a website devoted to encouraging immigrants to settle, work and start businesses in the province. At http://www.welcomebc.ca newcomers can find all kinds of easily accessible information on social and business topics, including profiles of regions all over the province. The site is part of B.C.’s Provincial Nominee Program designed to make it easier for skilled workers and experienced entrepreneurs to settle there. Since 2001, British Columbia has welcomed more than 4,300 skilled and business immigrants and their families through this program.

Encourage Online Interaction and Collaboration
There are numerous other examples of effective marketing to immigrants on the Web, but they have one general weakness – they tend to present information in one direction and do not facilitate interactivity. Your business attraction site targeted to new immigrants could gain an advantage by incorporating blogs, surveys and comment boxes, opening up a dialogue with the immigrant communities you wish to attract.

All of this activity would increase the rankings of your site in search engines and draw larger audiences to your messages. So would linking your site to online communities that are already a focus for activity among immigrant business people.

They are not hard to find. Think of how your community’s prospects for enhancing its immigrant work force could be strengthened by associating with groups such as, say:

•Latin Immigrant Niagara Community Association, http://niagara.cioc.ca/record/NIA5922
•Ethiopian Community Association of Chicago, www.ecachicago.org/OurPrograms.asp
•Greater Chinatown Community Association in New York City,
www.design21sdn.com/organizations/316

Such groups are everywhere and can be approached to become allies to excite interest in your community as a place of opportunity. And they are not just on the Web but on social-networking sites and services. Facebook is a good example. Do you know how many organizations you can find by searching for “Latin people of Columbus, Ohio” (http://www.facebook.com/s.php?q=Latin+people+in+Columbus&n=-1&k=400000000010&sf=r&init=q&sid=9563136ed2f03cd1c5d428875dc7550c) or “Portuguese people of London, Ontario (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2244241716) ?

Reach out to New Immigrants
You can market effectively to new immigrants by reaching out through the web and social-networking sites to those already in your community, engaging them in dialogue, getting them involved in your investment-attraction programs and stimulating online activity. Your community could find itself at the very top of results pages when people search on the web for economic opportunities for immigrants.

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
The creative class – entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, artists, performers, technologists and other knowledge workers – will lead economic growth in future. This thesis, originated by Richard Florida, is a foundation of economic-development practices today and has been discussed previously in Tech Trends (see “Business Retention Means People Retention,” March 10, 2009). Now we are seeing the theory being applied successfully by a growing number of communities.

Such communities have developed strategies to be “talent magnets,” especially for young professionals aged 25 to 44. They have paid attention to Florida's research showing that any community that wants to improve its economy should look at how it stands with the three T's of economic development—technology, talent, and tolerance. All are necessary conditions for attracting creative people, generating innovation and stimulating economic growth, according to Florida.

Whether you are fully in agreement with his ideas or not, your investment-attraction strategy needs to take into account the creative class. So does your website and all the communications related to it.

Here are three examples of communities that are successfully putting these ideas into practice.

Austin, Texas
Austin in recent years has made considerable investments in its quality of life. It is an open and tolerant city with lifestyle centers for cycling and outdoor activities, a vibrant downtown community and a thriving music scene. It has a rapidly growing high-tech industrial center that has attracted investments from major companies.

The website of the Austin Chamber of Commerce, www.austinchamber.com/DoBusiness/index.html, uses the tag line “Austin, the Human Capital.” It says the city “gets the nod as a young, creative and entrepreneurial city in a dynamic, growing region.” The site has extensive information about green issues, features an online business incubator called the Central Texas Regional Center of Innovation and Commercialization, and links to a related site, www.liveablecity.org, which celebrates public engagement in Austin.

Calgary, Alberta
Thanks to a decade of attracting young, creative and artistic immigrants, Calgary has grown into a haven for the creative class. A survey by Maclean’s magazine in 2008 ranked Calgary the most cultured city in Canada. Now its arts industries and not-for-profit organizations are providing pillars to support the city in the midst of a severe oil and gas recession.

A recently released Economic Development Strategy identified quality of life as a foundation of sustainability for Calgarians. A number of initiatives are planned to support the strategy through websites as well as the new world of social media. The first of these programs is Calgarypedia, www.calgarypedia.com, a wiki-based website launched in October 2008. With content created and maintained by Calgarians, it is serving as a platform to communicate information about the organizations, activities, events, history and stories that position Calgary as an investment location of choice.

Prince Edward County
In southeast Ontario, Prince Edward County is enjoying an economic renaissance by reinventing itself as “Canada’s first creative rural economy.” As described in detail at www.pecounty.on.ca/government/corporate_services/economic_development/index.php, the County’s strategy of exploiting its quality of place and lifestyle attributes has attracted many creative businesses.

Prince Edward County’s investment-attraction site, www.buildanewlife.ca/site/, includes links to Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. The site also features a virtual Collaboration Centre where researchers, developers and community members from anywhere in the world can meet to exchange ideas about creative rural economies.

Best Practices
What best practices can be gleaned from the websites of communities that are successfully targeting the creative class?

1. Be different! Recognize that site selectors and businesses are looking at your community as one choice in a sea of options. To stand out you need to consider not just what your community has to offer, but what it offers that is unique, and to reflect that difference on the Web.

2. Involve the community. Locate members of the creative class already in your community, find out who they are, what they read, what they purchase, and what drives their decisions. Use their ideas and experiences in your communications, especially on the web and in social media.

3. Aim carefully at specific targets. Creative economy strategies are not simply focused on recruiting the creative class. They are built upon attracting select sectors, such as digital media, gaming, film and music, graphic and industrial design, and arts manufacturing. Which sub-sectors is your community best positioned to be a magnet for? Focus your creative resources and incentive programs on them, and keep your messages consistent through all media and partner organizations.

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
When a new technology trend becomes established it often has implications for investment attraction. It is now widely known, for example, that the web is the most important medium used by site selectors to gather information. A new rule of thumb arises from this - the quality of your website is a key factor in determining the success of your economic development program.

What characterizes a high-quality website? There are many facets to the answer but one principle has become clear: as a medium for communications, the site needs to be more than the sum of its parts.

That is, the site should have the ability to generate interest and activity beyond itself - beyond being simply a place where people can visit and find information. Your site should be the center of a wide and active network of interest.

This is where Web 2.0 comes in and social media bookmarking is one facet of Web 2.0 tactics. It can be used to enhance your website so that people can more easily discover, remember and share the information you publish about your community.

By providing easy to use and conveniently located bookmarking links on your website you can encourage visitors to add your website to their own social media sites, making your website a point of interest. Typical bookmarking sites include Delicious, Digg, Technorati, Furl, Simpy, Citeulike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Blogger, Facebook, Mixx, Propeller, Reddit, Slashdot, and LinkedIn.

Once added to a social bookmarking site, the link, and therefore your website, can be shared with other people who share the same interests or work in the same field. This opens up your information and stories to a whole new network of people who might not have found about you otherwise. Now it is possible that viral marketing about your municipality can take place.

Many site selectors have found social bookmarking sites an important time-saving tool because they, like everyone else, have a problem in finding relevant information and keeping track of it all.

As the bookmark is shared amongst a network of people and is imported or added to other people's bookmark lists your website actually becomes more visible in a number of ways: First, your search engine rankings can improve due to the expanding number of links generated to your website. Second, many people use social bookmarking sites for Internet searches as the bookmarks have been tagged to identify the main content of websites, resulting in more relevant search results.

As social bookmarking services have matured and become more popular, additional features have been added, including ratings and comments, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers and e-mailing of bookmarks and web annotation.

For site selectors, access to such features adds to the competitive qualities of an economic development site by helping them organize their searches, find opportunities of high interest in the market and keep track of potential sites associated with their highest priorities.

Saving time, making it easy, making the information easily shared and searchable by category - these are the reasons why economic developers need to consider adding bookmarking tools to their websites. You can take advantage of these tools to extend your site into a network of information repositories that link users around the world. That is part of what competitiveness means today.

Anya Codack, CEO
Phone: 416-977-9724 x 509
Fax: 416-642-1959
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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue

What’s new in tourism communications? The idea that, instead of just publishing or broadcasting information to people who might be interested to visit your community, you build personal relationships with them through an online information network.

This type of network concentrates on what’s happening NOW. The personal messages that go back and forth between your community’s representatives and the network of people they interact with aren’t about static information. They aren’t about last week. They are about this moment, and the number of people who are eager to capture this moment online is growing explosively around the world.

The most popular network they are using is called Twitter. This social-networking site, launched in 2006, was originally intended for individuals to send micro-blogs to their friends, on the topic of “What are you doing now?” But as so often happens, business quickly saw an opportunity and now a growing number of tourism marketing boards, in Nova Scotia, Chicago, Baltimore and Queensland, Australia, are using it to reach potentially millions of people with their messages.

The messages are delivered from one or more persons, in conversational professional tone, and they can be read by anyone searching www.twitter.com by topic or name. More importantly, they can be received and read instantly as text messages by people using computers – or more often, mobile devices – who have registered to receive the person’s “tweets.” In Twitter lingo, they have signed up to be “followers” of the message sender.

Followers like to respond to messages with comments or questions. These come right back to the message sender and also appear on the Twitter site of the sender’s tourism organization, which of course is also linked to its website.

Whoa, does this sound like a lot of work and time? Oh, yes. But there are ways you can spread the workload, by enlisting followers to help answer questions and by spacing out your informational tweets.

Nevertheless this is certainly a time-consuming information channel – but one with the potential to attract widespread interest to your community’s tourism offerings because you are part of NOW. Twitter is a social medium. Social networking is more immediate than any other form of communication. It’s growing and it is the norm for young people.

It requires dedicated resources and a willingness to be experimental and even impromptu in carrying out your tourism marketing plan.

You can begin slowly. After registering on Twitter, complete the user profile information, including a link to your tourism website and any blogs originating from it. You can even establish a home page on Twitter that mirrors the one on your site.

Start up by searching for people that you would like to have follow you and follow them. Then begin to post frequent short blog-like messages (tweets) about events, activities or new announcements related to tourism in your community. Include links to your website/blogs for more information.

Slowly at first, people will begin to register as followers because they want to receive more such information. Then you can follow them back. In most cases, they are potential visitors and could bring revenue into your community. Send new followers a genuine thank-you tweet or direct message and let them know you are available if they need trip-planning assistance.

Once you have a couple of dozen posts to your credit and a handful of followers, issue a news release telling that world that your tourism organization is using Twitter. Include it in your communications to your industry partners and database, and post a Twitter link on your website. All of these activities will attract the attention of search engines and make it more likely that your tourism website will appear prominently when people search by topic.

Did you know that Twitter has a search engine too? It is part of a new crop of start-up search engines designed to make searches faster and more personal. Using Twitter search can help you find twitterers interested in travel and event information. You can become followers of their tweets and learn more about your market. Local twitterers may be primarily interested in current information while those from remote locations might be looking for ideas, deals and help in trip planning.

What’s the long-term potential of using Twitter? How large can your network grow? These are unknowns yet, but it is easy to measure your network growth and activity, and the ROI from your investment of time. People are likely to tell you when they have visited your community as a result of information obtained via Twitter.

Twitter is a community. People build their networks by following and being followed by other people. As a tourism marketer, you need to spend time building your network but if it thrives, the network itself can be your marketer.

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue

Congratulations! Your community has just attracted a major investment from a well-known company!

Now your publicity engine will kick into gear as your economic development department issues a news release to celebrate and exploit the good news.

But then what?  If you wait until another big event happens before communicating again, you could wait a long time. In many municipalities this is exactly what happens. As a result, external communications for investment-attraction purposes are infrequent, reflecting the (out-dated) view that people would only be interested in headline news.

The world has changed. Today’s best practices, which we refer to as “Economic Development 2.0.”, demand that investment-attraction strategies are supported by ongoing, frequent communications utilizing a variety of online channels.

Daily or weekly updates should be used to keep stakeholders, prospects and residents informed, both on the good and the bad news. Posting information on all channels makes it easier to manage municipal brand perception, especially during a weak economy where layoffs or plant closures can make good news sparse.

Think you don’t have enough news?

While the big announcements are a natural for creating news, many other topics can also provide a reason for staying in touch with your readers, including:
•      Small announcements,
•      Upcoming and/or past events,
•      Participation in events, trade missions or conferences,
•      Start of new initiatives,
•      Completion of plans or programs,
•      Council approval of an initiative,
•      Blog updates,
•      Business success stories,
•      Awards won by local businesses,
•      Updates on stats,
•      Training programs,
•      Business support programs,
•      And so on!

Keep in mind that “content” for today’s web-browsing site selectors is by no means restricted to words.  Photos, graphics and videos are becoming barometers of high website standards in the eyes of site selectors.

In the era of web 2.0, economic developers have the opportunity to use a many channels to disseminate all their news. A dissemination strategy should be created to document how often news is created, in what format, for which audience, which channel should be used to distribute it and what the publishing workflow process is.

If you operate multiple websites, such as a site for economic development, tourism, recreation, library, museum and your main municipal site, make sure that all sites have the ability to inform their respective visitors about their own news as well as common updates.

Now more than ever, economic-developers must take a leadership through communication to promote all the great things that their communities are doing to be proactive, to foster growth, to help existing businesses, to ensure people are being trained and working. Encouraging commentary and inviting the community at large to share their good news and their thoughts is one way to demonstrate this leadership and to foster a spirit of working together.

Lastly, always invite feedback and track visitor stats to see the impact of your communications!

Anya Codack, CEO
Phone: 416-977-9724 x 509
Fax: 416-642-1959
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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
“If we don’t get the Web right, no matter what we do with everything else that is on the list of tourism issues, we will lose our competitive position.  The Web is at the heart of our industry on a go-forward basis.”

Dick Brown, Ottawa Gatineau Hotel Association, quoted in the Ontario Tourism Competitiveness Study report, “Discovering Ontario: A Report on the Future of Tourism,” released February 2009.

When people travel today, they research destinations and book on the Web.  Maintaining your community’s competitiveness as a tourist attraction means first and foremost having a website that attracts people and anticipates their traveling needs.

A tourism website must have certain characteristics to be competitive.  Those aren’t necessarily the same characteristics as a municipality’s site or an investment-attraction site.  To follow best practices, the tourism site should be managed as a distinct entity.  There are three main reasons for this:

1.      Tourism has a unique target audience. The majority of tourists will not be interested in municipal information.
2.      Multiple sites for a municipality, including a tourism site, increase search engine rank and the ability to be found due to targeted content,
3.      Tourism information easily gets crowded out when buried in a general site.

What sorts of information should be specific to a tourism website to make it competitive?  Perhaps surprisingly, the first priority need not be to show off outstanding scenery or a national historic site.  Effective marketing on the Web can bring tourists to your community for many reasons and help build its reputation for attractiveness.

Start with bread-and-butter facts.  Where are the places to stay, to eat, to shop, to get away for a quiet time?  A surprising number of communities in Ontario do not offer one-stop access to such information on their websites.  Collecting it and keeping it up to date is, of course, a big job – all the more reason to devote specific resources to it, rather than asking the municipal webmaster to put something together when there is time.

But don’t be content with just lists or brief descriptions of tourism offerings.  A competitive tourism site does more than present information in words and images.  It helps visitors make decisions about where they would like to go, based on their own situations and preferences.

What are the price ranges of the accommodations and restaurants in your region?  When are they open?  How far would people have to travel from their home towns to reach your tourism attractions?  Are tours or packages available?  By providing answers to such questions you will encourage visitors to drill down into your site.

A useful aid to decision-making is to group tourism attractions by their appeal to different age groups.  Another is to offer a trip-planning tool so that visitors can go through the site and add various events and attractions to their itinerary.

For special events, fairs, festivals and other scheduled attractions, include within your listings a link to a dedicated Web page for each one.  Imbed keywords such as “midway rides” or “folk music” in the descriptions, headlines and page headings.  These techniques elevate the scores that your pages will receive on search-engine results pages.  The better your website information matches the search criteria entered by Internet users, the higher up the list your link will be displayed and the more likely the search engine is to direct traffic to your website.

Another important characteristic of competitive tourism websites is that they should be interactive.  Interactive features let visitors enter in specific information to generate personalized responses.  For example they can type in search preferences, travel dates and location coordinates to obtain specific answers to questions, find out what events may be on during their visit, participate in polls or contribute evaluations of places they have visited.

Today’s website visitors want to participate in online discussions and evaluations with other people as part of their decision-making process.  For that reason don’t design your site to be viewed by one person at a time.  Design it as a redistribution mechanism, so viewers can easily pass the information around through social networks and discussion sites.

Does your site contain videos that can be viewed on YouTube?  Does it have news releases that visitors can post on Digg?  There are a growing number of such Web 2.0 sites as people increasingly use computers as their first choice for travel research.  Including social media features keeps users involved and up to date with what you have to say about your community’s attractiveness.

Invite tourism by through an inviting website experience!

Anya Codack, CEO
Phone: 416-977-9724 x 509
Fax: 416-642-1959
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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
News releases used to be written for, and sent to, only the media.  Usually that meant the print media, and for economic development departments it meant print media concerned with investment attraction.

But the first rule of modern news releases is that they should no longer be targeted to traditional media only.  A difficult economic climate and the advent of new technologies have combined to change modern strategies toward news releases for investment-attraction purposes.

Releases need to generate optimum returns on investment, so they should be written to appeal to as broad an audience as possible.  Decide beforehand what you want the release to achieve other than simply disseminating information.  Do you want to impress site selectors with the dynamism of your community?  Do you want local businesses and employees to continue to be confident that they are in the right place?  Do you want government agencies to know about the sectors your community is fostering?  In the age of the Web, all these audiences and more – potentially millions of people – have access to your release, unfiltered by the media.

You need to write for them.  Write directly for your target audiences in addition to the media that you hope will also reach them.  In particular, provide information that site selectors and business investors specifically look for.  Present your news with accompanying data about your community’s population, income levels, labour statistics, quality of life, industrial clusters – the kinds of criteria that companies have on their selection charts.

The second rule of modern news releases is that they should generate two-way activity.  In addition to directing information outward to promote something noteworthy happening in your community, today’s releases have the additional purpose of drawing traffic to your economic-development website.  In other words, they need to be viewed as part of your search-engine marketing strategy.

Write releases that are replete with keywords and phrases that are most likely to be entered by site selectors using search engines to seek potential opportunities.  Imbed links in releases to deliver potential investors to landing pages on your website.

First and foremost, publish the release on your website, along with inter-website links to it from all relevant pages, such as your home page. Make it even easier to pass the press-release along to a colleague by adding “tell-a-friend” functionality.

A useful tool is RSS, or Really Simple Syndication.  Enable your site with RSS feed capability so that viewers can sign up to receive your releases automatically.

RSS is one of the main ways in which bloggers aggregate content.  For that reason an RSS-enabled release has the ability to reach a wide net of people who have an express interest in your community or its activities.

Next inform those on your regular email list by sending a mass mail to let them know about your news. Make sure that the subject line is clear and that the email quickly takes them to the press release itself.

This leads to the next rule for investment-attraction news releases: distribute them in the Web 2.0 world as well as the traditional media world.

Today, you must make sure that your message can be found where your audiences look for it. 
•      Free and low-cost online press release websites offer an excellent channel for dissemination.
•      If you have a blog, let your readers know about the press release here.
•      Social networks such as Linked-In, Twitter, and Facebook constitute a collaborative, interactive and dynamic source of community, information and commentary.

The more presence your municipality has in these communities through distribution of news releases and announcements, the more frequently the community will appear on lists of search-engine results.

Social networks also enable access to your news by others who have similar interests.  If those interests converge on your investment-attraction release, you may find it going “viral” – reaching vast numbers of people and organizations and creating audiences for your release that you didn’t know were there.

One other best-practice rule remains to be discussed for news releases – how often they should be published, and under what circumstances.  We will examine that issue in the following article in the larger context of the importance of frequent communications.

Anya Codack, CEO
Phone: 416-977-9724 x 509
Fax: 416-642-1959
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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
You’ve heard the famous expression, “If you build it, they will come.”  That might well apply to baseball diamonds but unfortunately it doesn’t apply to investment-attraction websites.

You have to entice your audiences; they won’t necessarily find you on their own.  That’s why your department needs to understand search-engine marketing.

Most Web traffic is brokered by search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.  To do well in business on the Web, you must also do well in the eyes of the search engines.

Since the 21st century began, search engine marketing has become a cyber-industry.  It encompasses activities that increase the algorithm-based ranking of websites and thus their visibility in the results pages of search engines.  Typically, the higher up a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive.

Search engine marketing techniques are varied and encompass some activities your department can do itself.  There are others you might want to pay for by hiring search-engine marketing firms and consultants, website developers or advertising agencies.

As a simple first step, assess the content of your site with a view to raising its search-engine ranking in desired categories.  Ask the question: When a person we want to attract to our site enters a search request, what keywords will that person probably use?

Spread those keywords liberally around your site, in your menus and topic headings, and in any other forms of communication generated from your site such as blogs.  For example, if you want people to find your website when they type “tourism” into the search box, then you need to have a high density of the keyword “tourism” on your pages.

It is important to remember that search engines do not index a website.  They index web pages.  This means that all of your web pages should be optimized individually.  You need to integrate keywords into high-quality content on each page that satisfies the needs of your target viewers.

Another factor in search-engine rankings is the number of links between your website and those of other relevant organizations.  The more other websites link to your site the more important it will be in the eye of search engines.

In Ontario, the South Simcoe Economic Alliance, which supports strategic growth for four municipalities south of Lake Simcoe, has been ranked by Site Selection Magazine as one of the top Canadian economic development groups partly because its continual search- engine optimization and linking strategies have resulted in first-place Google rankings.

Some search engines operate paid subscription services that guarantee that a subscribing website will be included in search results.  Advertising opportunities are also available.  Google, for instance, offers a service called AdWords in which subscribers create ads and choose keywords so that when people search on Google using one of the keywords, the subscriber’s ad may appear next to the search results.  Viewers can click on the ad to reach the advertiser’s site directly.

It is critical that your department understands the basics of search-engine marketing.  The Web has become the number one tool for businesses and site selectors in their location searches.  As almost 90% of site selection searches begin on the Web, drawing site selectors to your site by means of search engines absolutely should be one of the tactics of your economic development marketing strategy.

And, as a best practice, every marketing strategy should include ongoing website search engine optimization as a regularly scheduled tactic.

Anya Codack, CEO
Phone: 416-977-9724 x 509
Fax: 416-642-1959
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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
What makes a website outstanding for investment attraction?  What are the critical characteristics that will draw a site selector’s interest?

A set of best practices is emerging as experience reveals the growing importance of the web in economic development, especially in a recessionary climate when returns on investment are more important than ever.

The first necessity is to understand the web’s place in the field of investment attraction.  It has both a passive and an active role.

The passive role is akin to that of a store.  Investors who are searching for something to buy will look at your site just as a browsing shopper looks at a storefront.  This is of much more than casual importance.  Once an investor has identified the objectives, approach and criteria of a site-selection project, the web becomes the focus of the next phase.  It is the first source for identifying candidate communities.

Site selection is a process of elimination.  If your community’s website does not meet the site selectors’ criteria for information that is easily found, the selector will probably pass you over regardless of what your community can truly offer.

At the same time, economic development departments are increasingly using websites in an active role, broadcasting information and images that reach out to a global market to attract individual attention.

With both roles in mind, below is a quick look at some key best practices:

Ease of Use
Site selectors should find it easy to locate contact information and relevant content on your site through user-friendly navigation, site search and inter-site linking that draws the visitor’s attention to specific information or news.  But don’t think solely of the viewers.  The site must also be easily managed so that staff can update information quickly and simply.  Otherwise the site will become outdated and that completely negates its impact.

Content Completeness
Your site must offer information and data that is directly pertinent to someone interested in locating their business in your municipality.  This includes information and data about your primary industry sectors, the cost of doing business, statistics about your labour force, proximity to highways and border crossings, and local success stories.  Think like a site selector – what is top of mind?  Equally important is to incorporate the knowledge of your existing business community concerning the needs of their industries and the strengths that your community delivers.

First Impression
The branding, look and feel, content and structure of the site all combine to create a first impression.  It may be the only message that a site selector sees before moving on to evaluate the next municipality.  Your site must be distinctive and visually appealing with professional use of maps, photography and graphical images.

Measure Results
Your website strategy should have sound performance objectives.  The number of site visitors and their behavior patterns should be tracked, documented and analyzed against pre-established goals or key performance indicators.  An effective way to evaluate the effectiveness of your site is to compare it with others.  Set benchmarks and evaluate how your site measures up to peer sites in your geographic area.

Two-Way Communication
A modern, effective economic development site is not simply an electronic brochure.  It speaks with your audiences, literally.  Incorporation of interactive features such as blogs, videos, drill-down maps, cost calculators, land and space databases, polls and surveys all encourage visitor participation. Facilitation of these types of two-way communication tools should be given priority at least as high as the textual presentation of facts and data.

The impact of Web 2.0 technologies is increasing every day in business life, presenting a powerful new communications channel for economic developers. Now more than ever, it is possible to communicate - not just disseminate!

Anya Codack, CEO
Phone: 416-977-9724 x 509
Fax: 416-642-1959
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Information Technologies - 2009 Issue 
Gas prices have relaxed, the Canadian dollar is back to a reasonable level and SARS is ancient history.  But the tourism floodgates are still far from open, no thanks to a sputtering economy and mandatory passports just around the corner. Fortunately die-hard travelers haven’t stopped traveling, they are just being much more cautious.  It’s basically a matter of trust – and destination marketers can look to hosted web video to build that trust like no other medium around.

 

Yes, a confluence of external factors beyond the control of Canadian destination marketers has dramatically impacted the overall number of travelers. In 2006, same-day car trips by Americans to Canada saw the biggest drop to date, hitting their lowest level since 1972.

This is real, but what can destination businesses do besides holding these external excuses hostage until a miracle happens? While spur-of-the-moment day-trippers – often a tightfisted lot – may become relics of the past, the high-spending, die-hard traveler will barely bat an eye at all these obstacles. But they will be much more cautious about where they travel. It’s all about gaining their trust.

But how? We must realize that to get the die-hard traveler’s wallet back, we have to do a better job of pre-selling the experience – while breaking down all and any risk factors. Eliminate any doubt they might have about coming to your destination. You see, pretty pictures and flowery words won’t cut it anymore. The traveler just isn’t buying into those fancy magazine ads. Well, that is unless those ads are backed by serious and very convincing internet marketing.

I don’t have to tell you that most travelers research their destinations on the ‘Net. Travel destination decisions are heavily influenced by how well your site delivers what the prospect is looking for. If your web site is three or five years old (or even more ancient, God help you if it is!), chances are that your online marketing strategy is out of date. Not necessarily your content, but how it is being delivered.

There are some fundamental questions you should ask yourself. Is my site user friendly? Can prospects navigate easily? Does the prospect end up where I want them to end up? Is my message strategy geared to the prospect or to my competitor? This latter question is a whole other article though. The bottom line is that your web site should be working 24-7 as a virtual sales agent. When destination marketers started using the web as a marketing vehicle, we were designing sites as an online brochure. Up until a couple of years ago this was fine. A well designed “brochure style” site didn’t do too badly with conversions. This isn’t nearly as effective anymore. Now imagine a site that has incredible converting power, a site that not only delivers visual appeal, but literally speaks to the prospect and guides them where to click next.

The increase in broadband subscribers and the development of new video streaming technologies have opened the door to more creative possibilities to get your message across in a unique and interesting way. With green screens and some video editing, a live host can now turn your static web site into your very own TV channel. You can now pre-sell your prospects using the spoken word, complete with the emotional inflections that the written word could never convey.

This brings us back to trust. Whether it’s a hostess at a restaurant or a greeter at Wal-Mart, it’s all about establishing a level of comfort and trust – something the most gifted copywriter using the most inspired copy can rarely achieve.

But don’t can your copywriter just yet. Your online host still needs a carefully written script that will not only give a full picture of your destination, but will actually guide them through your site for more information, and more importantly, for conversion. The “KISS” theory applies in full force here “Keep It Short & Sweet”. No one wants to sit and listen to someone yammer on for a half an hour – that may be fine for traditional TV, but this is Internet TV, where we all suffer symptoms of attention deficit. Short 15 to 30 second segments are all you need – and all your viewer will sit through. As your host speaks to your demographic, they will get a better feel for your destination, making their decision a much easier one. Let me give you an example, a scenario we’ve all been through at one time or another. You’ve just sat down at a restaurant that you’ve never been to before. You’re not sure what to have, so you ask your server for a recommendation. The server suggests the sautéed tenderloin with wine sauce, delivering the pitch with excitement and enthusiasm (and often very well-scripted too). The same description read fine on the menu, but then again so did all the other dishes. But listening to it right from the horse’s mouth just makes it sound that much better, as you envision the mouth-watering flavours that the chef has painstakingly prepared. In essence, your server has just pre-sold the experience that you might have. You visualize yourself enjoying the dish while it is being described. And if executed convincingly, more likely than not, you’ll be going with the tenderloin.

Just like at the restaurant, a host on your web site gives the visitor a clear path in which to follow, describing the experience and greatly reducing any possible doubts by pre-selling the experience. There’s no better way to do that than with the spoken word, delivered instantly and effectively through web video.

It’s all part of concept we call Brandcasting, where you use your own web site as an Internet TV station to effectively broadcast your brand to your visitors. You control the branding, programming, distribution and monetization of your own channel.

But video production, you ask, won’t that cost an arm and a leg? It doesn’t have to. In all likelihood you’ll be able use content you already have – still photography, video footage, etc. You’re just re-purposing it and using it in a very innovative and creative way. That alone makes it a much more cost effective web site to develop.

Let’s remind ourselves that solid online, offline and SEO marketing strategies still apply here. It doesn’t matter how much you invest in web video functionality, it won’t make a difference to your bottom line if no one visits your site. But as a start, with a brandcasting approach driving your new web site, you might never need to ask yourself, “how can I differentiate myself from the competition?” again.

 

Luc Courtois                      
President
180 Marketing
Website: www.do180.com

BODtv™: www.bodtv.ca

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