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Let’s
play a mental exercise. Pretend that we work
for the economic development partnership of my
hometown, Richmond, VA. Assume that we’re
trying to recruit a corporate headquarters to
the region, and one of our sales pitches is
the great quality of life that makes it easy
to recruit executives from outside the state.
Once
upon a time, we largely controlled the flow of
information – not the statistical
information, which any diligent consultant can
ferret out, but the qualitative information
that requires an intimate knowledge of the
community. We would take the visiting CEO on a
tour of the region and set up meetings with
the local politicians and business leaders
whom we knew would create a good impression.
But
what if our prospect or their site location
consultants were savvy enough to search the
Internet for alternative voices – voices
that weren’t part of the local power
structure? What might they find? A lot more
than you think. With the proliferation of
blogs – more formally known as Web logs, a
type of interactive journal on the World Wide
Web -- every crank, gadfly and activist group
with an axe to grind now has a platform to
express their views.
If
our imaginary prospect were diligent enough to
Google the blogs in the Richmond area, they
might find some unflattering observations,
such as this real posting that appeared the
other day:
A
few years back, someone had the great idea
that it would make some kind of difference if
Richmond had a catchy slogan to call our own.
They came up with the saccharine
"Richmond: Easy to Love", probably
spending boodles of $$$ in the process. …
Now, years later, there is some movement for a
new and better slogan. … As an accurate and
appealing description of the city, "Richmond:
It sucks less," can not be beat.
That’s
an endorsement you can live without!
I
recount this story about my own home town
because I can also assure readers from
first-hand experience that Richmond is, in
fact, a really great place to live and work!
But that’s not the point. The point is that
literally millions of opinions are floating
around the Internet, and they are no further
away than a keyword search on Google.
Economic
developers must come to grips with a new
reality: we no longer control the message. If
you thought that websites were a force for the
“democratization of information,”
they’re nothing compared to blogs. Where it
took at least a rudimentary knowledge of HTML
programming to launch a website, it takes no
technical expertise whatsoever to set up a
blog. Just go to www.blogger.com,
and you’ll see that you can get a blog up
and running for free in just a few minutes.
Blogs
are being created by the millions. According
to the Technorati website, which tracks blogs,
a new weblog is created every 7.5 seconds, at
the rate of about 12,000 a day. Not all
bloggers live in America, and not every blog
is maintained with any diligence, but
there’s no denying that blog content is
multiplying at a dizzying rate. Technorati
estimates that there are 275,000 new blog
posts, or entries, per day.
The
vast majority of blogs are personal in nature
– digital diaries, so to speak – and
they’re maintained mostly by the 20- to 30-year-old
age group. Although most blogs are too mundane
to generate widespread interest, the more
literate blogs are fast becoming mainstream
reading. Blogs covering national and
international issues, such as Daily Kos,
InstaPundit, Michelle Malkin and
Power Line – have tens of thousands
of regular readers. Recently, credible
community blogs have begun popping up in
significant numbers. Not surprisingly, many
take an anti-establishment slant – sometimes
protesting unpopular industrial locations,
real estate deals and civic projects – and
contradict the official party line of
government officials and economic developers.
Don’t
delude yourself that “nobody’s reading
that junk.” According to the Pew Internet
and American Life Project, about 11 percent of
all Internet users read blogs. And readership
is accelerating as technologies make the
content more readily available. Google, owner
of the wildly popular Blogspot blogging
service, now indexes blog
content and makes it available through key
word searches. Other websites, from Technorati
to Blogwise,
organize blogs by content category.
Technology
companies are figuring out how to data mine
this ocean of content. Blogs are becoming
recognized as an important channel for the
expression of popular sentiment that
venture-funded tech companies are developing
techniques for sifting through the blog sludge
to track public perceptions regarding major
brands and corporate reputations.
There
are some obvious lessons here for economic
developers who want to stay abreast of local
perceptions and opinions that may affect
prospects’ opinions.
First,
be aware that some blogger you’ve never
heard of could be contradicting you. It’s
only a matter of time before site location
consultants begin employing these tools to
check the assertions made by economic
developers and their local stakeholders.
Second,
find out what the bloggers are saying; although
you can’t control it, you can be informed to
counteract any half-truths.
Internet
clipping services can monitor websites, blogs
and message boards automatically for the
mention of your community’s name – and
send you an e-mail that will update you on a
daily basis. Using these new tracking tools,
site selection consultants can learn as much
about your community – its prevailing
attitudes towards business, towards work,
towards creativity and authority, towards
local controversies, conflicts and tensions
– as you know about it yourself.
The
Internet is scrambling all the old rules. The
Web is not just a place to post a digital
brochure about your community. It’s a source
of business intelligence – information
that’s accessible to the whole, wide world.
Talk
to us -- 310 Ltd. can help make sure that you
aren’t the last to know.
--
November 28, 2005
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