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"Economic Development Marketing Letter"
A Blane, Canada Ltd. Publication
Nationally Recognized Experts On Economic Development Marketing and Retention
January 2001, Volume: 4, Issue: e/1 ~~~Clear and concise?... “The court finds that the plaintiffs have failed to carry the requisite burden of proof, and judgment shall be and hereby is entered that plaintiffs shall take nothing by this action and the defendants may go hence without delay.” JUDGE N. SANDERS SAULS, with reference to presidential vote count before him in Florida court. Is your prose clear and concise, or does it challenge the reader to decipher? ~~~A plan... doesn’t guarantee success. To succeed, you must continue to question indicators, progress benchmarks, and results, while managing expectations of those to whom you report. ~~~On the wall... “Goals are dreams with deadlines.” Anon. Source: Sal Fragapane’s Tire and Auto, Rome, NY ~~~Software employees... To learn how many software employees are located within your region, read the trend reports and other info reported by the Software and Information Industry Association in Washington, DC. For instance, they have taken data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (most recent was 1998) and broken job titles down by MSA. Programmers, analysts, engineers and computer scientists are listed by occupation code, number employed, hourly and annual wages. Want to use such data on your web site or make sure you can support the computer industry concentration claims you have made? Go to http://www.siia.net/ Thanks to Kate O’Hara, IL for her research! ~~~RESPONSES
TO OUR COMMENTS: To better understand unionization, consider
union density. Union density is a percentage measurement of the entire workforce
belonging to unions (union workforce divided by total workforce X 100%). The
current national average for union density is 13.9%. At it’s peak, union
density reached 35%. The other relevant element in presenting unionization data
is the number and percentage of unionized workers employed by government as
compared to private sector companies. Finally, the specific unions can alter
one’s perception of the local labor force, e.g. an activist vs. non-activist
orientation. “My experience is that the NLRB (et al) cannot/will not release
this info. The best you can do is
obtain the total number of employees in an establishment which has a union
contract. Obviously, this can be
quite misleading since many of the employees in such an establishment may not
belong to the union, especially in right-to-work states.
The only way to get a true picture is to contact the management in each
unionized establishment and ask them. But you’ll find that many are reluctant
to respond - apparently the NLRB is highly protective of this info.” Mike
Eades, SC “No idea where to find the data—but my first step would
be to contact the AFL-CIO, which probably has its own set of figures which could
be broken out by geography—and which they are not likely to be shy about.”
Jon Brandow Good comments,
Mike and Jon. No, we don’t know of an easy source for union employment data.
This is exactly why we added the question, “What percentage of your workforce
is represented by a union?” to our business retention software, Synchronist
Business Information System® Editor’s Note: Existing Synchronist users will
have this and the corresponding union density report with version 3.0’s
release coming soon. Anyone have other suggestions for a source for union
demographic data? ~~~FYI... “Your readers might benefit from running their website through a review process on http://www.netmechanic.com>. It is a free trial tune-up and will give them a report on how their website performs. Also, another website that I use a great deal is http://www.ceoexpress.com. It contains a directory of business related websites by category. Lastly, http://www.wilsonweb.com has many helpful ideas on how to use a website for marketing.” WOW! Thanks to Dean Whittaker, MI ~~~”Expiration Date” response... “I wanted to comment about your idea of an “expiration date” for data. I don’t think that data ever really expires as long as it can be used in trend analysis. This is one of the problems with many e.d. organizations. They do not organize and track the data that they collect in a useful way, which, I believe, is one of the reasons you developed the Synchronist System.” Drew Conrad, IA ~~~Targeting tech?... Can your community attract the talent for tech? According to Richard Florida, founder and director of the Software Industry Center at Carnegie Mellon University, start by determining the percentage of gays in your population. (Yes, you read it correctly.) “The ‘gay index’ is the leading predictor of a city’s ability to attract and retain knowledge workers,” according to Florida. It’s not that gay employees themselves are a critical factor for building a tech-savvy base of operations. It’s that a gay population is a dependable indicator of the environmental factors - tolerance, openness to diversity, and lots of urban-oriented amenities - that are critical for attracting world-class workers.” Fast Company, January 2001 ~~~”Great newsletter... Easy-to-read format, excellent and useful content. I cut and paste to send relevant articles to other professionals and staff. Thanks for creating a great source of professional development assistance!” LP, VA ~~~SUBMIT
you budget data... In our December newsletter, we requested information
on your marketing budgets. The responses were most interesting but additional
responses are needed in order to have a more valid analysis. Your privacy is
important to us, so no names or organizations will be listed in the report.
Please take a few minutes to respond to the following survey, and e-mail it back
to us. THANKS! How
do you spend your marketing budget? Using the following categories, send us your
marketing budget breakdown (in percentages). Just hit your reply button, delete
everything except this question. Remember to include the cost of consultants as
well as an estimate of staff time as you allocate expenditures.
~~~Can you refer me... to some award winning brochures? We don’t collect award winning ED brochures. The judging standards used are meaningless from a true marketing perspective. These are beauty contests so on any given day, different materials will win depending on the judges and other pieces in the mix. Therefore, we have concluded the design side is pretty much irrelevant - as long as its business-like and makes the (pick-one: mayor, president, e.d. exec, committee chairman) happy. What is important is the content and how it is organized. The value of the award competition is for internal marketing. Volunteers and investors love to get awards. Agencies love to get awards. Plus, they make great copy in the organization’s newsletter. Source: Blane, Canada response to an e-mail request. ~~~Search engine... “Seeding” got you down? You’re not alone. Learn how to improve your ranking in all of the major search engines with tips found at JimWorld’s Search Engine Forums. Learn how to best seed your Web site in AOL, Excite, HotBot, Go/InfoSeek, Lycos, Northern Light, AltaVista, Yahoo!, Webcrawler, LookSmart, GoTo.com, Inktomi, Google, Direct Hit, The New ODP and more. You’ll also find articles on non-English search engines, the latest on meta tags and how to correctly seed dynamic pages generated with ASP, JSP and Cold Fusion. In our research, search engine seeding is a real shortcoming of e.d. Web pages. Editors recommend: http://www.searchengineforums.com ~~~Greater fool... “The only fool greater than the one who expects big results from small changes is the fool who believes big changes can be accomplished without risk. Opportunity and security are inversely proportionate: as one goes up, the other goes down. It’s a fundamental law of the universe.” Quote: Roy H. Williams, “Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads,” Bard Press, © 1999. ~~~CD romming... While we do not advocate CD Roms as a marketing tool (we might have said something disparaging like video of the 90’s), if you choose to create one, remember one of our earlier comments about Web design: “If a prospect finds information on your site (CD Rom) useful to their search, how can they capture it?” We strongly recommend embedding print keys, export functions, or pdf files for important charts, graphs, and tables. ~~~Smart... Kansas City Area Economic Development has implemented a concept which coincidentally we have been making for quite a while now. Divide your web page into two sections: one section for the community and internal audiences and one for external audiences, suspects and prospects. Well done, Bob and Martin. http://www.smartkc.com/
Blane, Canada Ltd.
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