Think about starting anew, and leaving your old one be.

Think about a micro site as a companion to your main website. Micro-sites typically cost than $5,000, and can be done with our freelance network and your staff.

• Pharma or OTC site: Health products in the pharmaceutical and OTC segments cry out for content. Web audiences are looking for help with their problems, whether it be beauty issues, minor ailments or major illness.
• Brand-centric site: Start a micro-site around one of your defunct or declining brand names. Show the history of the brand, the users of the brand and explain its current products, however modest. Allow readers to comment and post about what they like about the brand.
• Retailers: Build a separate site around one of your fashion lines or departments. Post concept ideas. Encourage readers to comment on merchandise, selection and direction.
• Financial Services: Build separate micro-sites around service-oriented stories and financial advice. The big banks do this, but create your own content relating to your offerings. Develop separate branch profiles, where you “brand” individual branches of your bank and the employees there.
• Resort Destination Guide: Build your own mini-Fodor’s guide to the area surrounding your resort, including neighboring attractions, restaurants, parks, churches and transportation. While  you might have some of this on your hotel’s site, putting it on a separate site, with links back to your booking site, will help not only build your resort’s traffic, but to reposition your resort as the most important hotel in the region.
• Magazine Ancillary Sites: Most magazine websites are all about giving away your valuable content in the hope that someone will click on some ads nearby. How about ancillary sites that revolve around niche products. Or why not test out a new pilot magazine concept as a website first?

Questions? Call us at 703-745-8602.

The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the power; but they who do not the thing have not the power.

This quote works on so many levels. But it is most appropriate to web content, and company blogs. If you want to be connected to the issue, you have to post something about it. It is that simple. You can talk about the issue, you can think about the issue, you can imagine the issue. You can even dream about the issue. But until you post something on the web, you aren’t the issue. Someone else is.

Talking to companies, they want to be a part of the discussion, the ideas, the thought leadership. But the only way to do that is to get into the game.

Remember. Each time you post something on the web with your church’s name on it, you spread the word about you, and your faith. In addition, register your church’s name in each of the social media websites; it will help you build links back to your main church website.

• Skype: Use Skype to broadcast sermons to homebound parishioners and across the world. Skype can also be used during meetings and services to talk to missionaries around the world who are working with your church.
• Twitter: Group and youth leaders can use Twitter to talk to members. Have them post the Twitter feed to Facebook; it can be done automatically.
• WordPress: Use blog softtware like WordPress for managing the content of your entire church website. Encourage ministers and even your choir and music directors to have their own blogs and post content related to their work. Not only sermons can be posted, but links and resources for study after church.
• Flickr: Post documentary-like pictures of the church buildings, as well as photos of church events. Tag each photo so that it can be found by others looking for photos of other things. Take photos of food drives and other church events. You should also post photos from mission trips as they happen.
• Use Facebook as an ersatz congregation directory.
• Scribd is an excellent service that allows people to post documents like bulletins, newsletters, sermons and such. Use it to post religious documents for other churches around the world. For instance, you can publish study materials, worksheets and even Sunday school coloring sheets. Make sure that whatever you share has your church’s website, address and telephone on the sheet, so you get some value out of it.

Today, with new technology, you still need to run commercials and do in-store, and all those other things. But now, you need to do other things, including posting content about your company on the web.

One of the easiest ways to do it is through WordPress, the open source software. The software is free; you just have to adapt it, and set up a content plan to make it useful.

You don’t have to be a big company to think about content that complements your business. Industries and ideas include:

1. Book publisher: If you publish books, use WordPress to promote your back catalog. Give each title a WordPress page, and allow readers to comment and add information about the title and the author.
2. Hotel chain: Use WordPress to build a companion site to your main booking website. Give each property a “story” on the new website, splicing booking links throughout.
3. Restaurant chain: Use WordPress to build an online cookbook with recipes, chef profiles and stories about your culinary tradition. Promote each individual restaurant as a unique proposition, including local managers and staff.
4. Hospitals: Use WordPress to build a medical guidebook branded with your hospital name. Write stories featuring physicians, nurses and other hospital staff, as well as adding in other features on medical health.
5. Consumer brands: Build a WordPress site around each brand, including historical information and current usage information.
6. Airlines: Launch a guide to a destination, or build theme-based travel guides for special events and promotions.
7. P.R. Firms: Build a thematic website for one of your clients on the fly.
8. Newspapers: Create a micro-site around a special section or a major advertiser.
9. Architecture firms: Use WordPress to promote your past projects, and keep them in front of the public.
10. City or destination: Use WordPress to launch idea specific travel websites.
11. Natural resources firms: Use WordPress to build an ecology-themed website featuring sustainable harvesting of timber.
12. Energy firms: Launch a science-oriented site that explains energy usage and our need for oil, nuclear, solar, wind, etc.
13. Utilities: With stories and diagrams, build a site that teaches students about how electric power is generated, and what the energy company is doing to help with conservation, etc. Use it as a recruiting and p.r. tool.
14. Attorneys and law firms: Create a website with information with helpful stories about your areas of case law, as well as historical information about your prior case work.

While your website content goes first on YOUR site, it has a second life online with places like Wikipedia, which can link back to your site. Here, an entry in Wikipedia on the Pan American WorldPort; it includes facts gathered from company websites, yet exists on its own, away from the company, which is defunct.

It is surprising that it takes so long for people to learn that content helps build website readership.

To get traffic to a website,  you can only do three things. You can either run ads, create inbound links or build content. While there is nothing wrong with the first two, building content is the best long term solution. It’s not like chicken and the egg. You have to have an egg to have  a chicken. But in the web, even if you JUST put up content and do little else, eventually Google, Bing and the rest will find your site, if the content is good enough.

That doesn’t mean you don’t want to think of other ways to build traffic like inbound links, but it does mean that you need to think of content first for your website.

Before you think of a website’s design, you want to think of the content. What readers do you want to reach? What is it you want to tell the reader? And how to you want to tell it to them? Once you answer those questions, you can begin thinking about your website redesign and how it will build website traffic.

When you think of what you want to tell readers, you need to build a plan for the content of your website. Here are some thoughts.

1. You are the publisher. Now, the company is the publisher, not the newspaper or the TV station or radio station. Pretend that you, as a company, own a newspaper. You, then as management, will be supervising the whole effort but you need someone content minded to help decide the words that are on the pages that you put out. So find someone who can come up with a list of ideas of what to promote on the website, and how to distribute that content weekly so the website stays fresh.
2. Watch for bells and whistles: There are many people who present a fancy face to a website, but they have made no allowances for keeping up the content of the website. Putting up a website is CHEAP. Hosting costs $10 a month for all except the busiest sites, and much of the software used to build a site is already on hand. So what you are spending is staff time. When someone proposes a website and you ask how this will be maintained, if they don’t have an answer, offer them the door.
3. Budget for the exact hours a week it will take to keep the site fresh for a year. I worked with one very astute agency with an aggressive social media plan and plan for a new website. However, there was no budget to produce the content that they wanted to Twitter. So it was all a big waste. You need to feed the beast! Twittering your website won’t work if your website has the same stale content. And you don’t want to spend lots of time just Twittering other websites just to build your Twitter feed. You want to build YOUR brand and traffic.
4. The website isn’t important. When you are thinking about a content plan for a website, you aren’t just thinking about your website. You are thinking about the content you want out there in the universe, no matter the forum, including web syndication. While you need to start with your own website, you need to realize that it doesn’t matter in the end where the information appears. What matters is that the information is out there. This is particularly important in tourism websites. Does it matter whether someone learns about the hotel on your website, or on some other website or social media site like Facebook? Of course it doesn’t matter. Think of the end goal, not the method.
5. Hire a journalist or a person who knows how to quickly come up with content to do the content. Certainly, a journalist isn’t the only person who can write copy, but they are almost always able to do it quickly and without fuss.
6. Don’t fuss over words. In the old era of print, companies obsessed over words. That makes sense when you are spending thousands of dollars on collateral, annual reports and the like. But on the web, the key to building content is putting lots of words out there, and using them to hook readers. While you don’t want bad grammar on a website, you can’t worry too much, because every day that you dither and piss, you miss talking to potential customers and readers. Get it out there and then fix it.
7. Enlist PR. Your company press releases are a part of website content, and you need lots of them to fill a website. But you need more than that, and you should enlist your PR staff as “staff writers” for your website. That will flatter them, and help you out.
8. Be mindful of personality. Your company website needs PEOPLE to work. Readers want to see the people who make up a company, so when you are talking about a company’s website content, you need to show the potential customer the people who make up the company. If you are a retailer, you need to show the staff. If you are a repair company, you need to play up the expertise of the repair guys. Whatever your niche, your employees from top down should be the “Stars” of your website.
9. Do not make it top down. Some companies only put their CEOs on the website. This is analogous to companies where the CEO parks right next to the front door, and makes the customers park far away. You don’t want to show that sort of company to your readers.
10. Be careful of barriers. There are many people whose turfs will be invaded with websites. On a redesign, you will begin to think it is 1985. IT folks think the own it because they know code. PR people think they own it because they are used to feeding the press with releases. Sales thinks they own it because they put out marketing materials. Executives think they own it because they are king and the website is the part of the company that most see first. The reality is that ALL departments have a voice in the website, but they each need to know that they have different areas. It’s like a factory floor. The PR people need to keep doing releases, as you need them for content. The IT people need to know how to keep it secure. The executives need to make sure it reflects the aspirations of the company. The branding people need to be sure it reflects the image.
11. Use WordPress. I cannot stress this enough. WordPress is so flexible and SEO-friendly that you can miss out if you aren’t using it at least for some part of your site or a micro-site. Certainly, there can be other blog software programs and CMS programs, but WordPress is used by some top news sites and companies, and it improves every month. Of course, if you are a catalog retailer or airline, your main website is about what you are selling. But why not do a separate micro-site to explain products, and link it back and forth?
12. Don’t keep it short. People will tell you that web readers want things fast, and need quick reads. That’s all true, but it doesn’t mean that long things don’t work on the web. An example is a 2,00o word company history. How else do you tell the story? Instead, what you need to do is vary the length of items on the website.
13. Map out who you need to talk to. Your content plan is about making contact with people, either suppliers, friends, future customers or everyday readers. So think about who those people are when you build the content of the site.
14. Keep it fresh for the bots. You need to stay on top of the stories published, and make sure they are updated. So even the most modest plan will fail if you do not keep updating the content. Google and other search engines come back to your website with “bots” when the website is updated with fresh content. The more updates, the more the Google-bots come.
15. What do readers want? Think about his. If you are a retailer, what information do your customers need to know about the products? For restaurant websites, talk about the food, chefs and recipes. For retailers, talk about what you sell and how to maintain it. For service companies, talk about HOW you do your work. There is content unique to you and your employees, and you need to share it with the public to tell them your story.

While the economy is in transition, the changes in technology and media are making it easier and easier for companies to talk DIRECTLY to their customers without a media filter.

Questions? Call Content Editor Garland Pollard at (703) 745-8602. Or email him for a time to talk.

There is one main reason why you want to publish a history of your company online. It’s because consumers want companies with experience. Period. There is a difference between IBM and a guy who starts up a computer consulting company. The guy who starts the company might have worked at IBM, but he does not have the history of IBM. If price is not a factor, nine times out of 10 the consumer will go with the company with the history, not the upstart.

History is particularly important when you are selling a destination. Travelers want to visit a place with some history. At right, an image from the Virginia Tourism Commission’s famous “Virginia Is For Lovers” ad campaign. Every ten years, they celebrate again the birth of the campaign, and talk about how it came to be. It’s an example of a brand using history to sell itself, and then the history of the history becomes history, and news yet again.

And if you have any history about your company, there are two ways to write it. You can allow others to write it, or you can write it yourself. We advocate the latter.

Writing your company history is the best way to:

1. Help solidify claims to your brands as well as differentiate your trademarks and intellectual property.
2. Create a public record of company ownership and creative authorship.
3. Dominate the discussion of your brand in social media, crowding out other ideas from Google’s top six search posts.
4. Promote your brand and company to anyone around the world.
5. Use assets like archival photographs for promotions and trade shows.
6. Clarify facts about your history and company. If you have problems in your company’s past, they are most likely on the internet. You want to give these events YOUR spin.
7. Raise the morale of current and retired employees. Employees are proud to work for companies that have a legacy.
8. Attract new employees by showing the continuity of the brand.
9. Give customers a sense of pride in your company.
10. Help current employees understand the past so they can better deal with the future.
11. Get your company files into a museum or archive for posterity.
12. Position your company by rebuilding the best and most workable parts of your company’s past.

A history document isn’t just a page on the internet with key facts about our company. It’s photos, archives and oral history. It’s documents. It can even be a micro-site companion to your main website. Start by keeping a file of clippings, photos and ideas. And then start writing.

Contact Editor Garland Pollard for ideas on getting your company history online. Or call him at 703-745-8602.

It’s a new era where the companies are writing a lot of the news. (See Joe Pulizzi’s industry website Junta42 for some background on the trend.)

Internally, these news sites can be fascinating. We think TheFordWay.com is the wave of the future. Execs at Ford saw independent sites like Allpar.com (Chrysler news) and BlueOvalNews.com (Ford news) having lots of fun and drawing readership about car news. So they launched TheFordStory.com, which is a readable and fun site about everything Ford.

Mind you, Ford still has a PR website, at media.ford.com, but the Ford Story site is for fans, consumers, employees, dealers, contractors and anyone else wanting to know first hand about what is happening at Ford. Lots of other companies and organizations are doing it too; Kaiser Health News is a news service just about health-care innovation. While it serves the purposes of Kaiser, it uses a journalistic format to influence the debate.

Even smaller companies can launch these websites, many of which operate with off-the-shelf WordPress software. Here at Black Cow Press, we are helping companies launch them. Below are a few ideas and best practices; talk to us if you need some guidance on setting up an internal or external program.

1. Point of view. Thou shalt have many, not just one. Readers are bored with a “company line” and anything that smacks of that. If you have more than one person at a company, you can’t have just one perspective. But it does need to be enthusiastic. The people writing need to LIKE the company; it needs to be written with the enthusiasm (but not style) of a Tiger Beat magazine.
2. The sites are not P.R. Your p.r. staff needs to keep drafting press releases, and those press releases should appear on news sites, perhaps in improved and more readable formats. But the site cannot be P.R. A bold P.R. department will suggest that you build a company news site, but many PR staffers are ill equipped to do it. They just have a different mindset and are used to controlling information and controlling the message. Those days are over.
3. News standards: You need to use news standards. This is not some esoteric idea, just that you need to use plain language, a consistent style of writing and editing, and a sense of  concern about what the reader is interested in reading. That is not to say you want to investigate yourself; instead the journalism should be focused on telling all aspects of the company story. Also, have your news guidelines agreed upon beforehand. You want everyone to understand the rules before the site launches.
4. Hire reporters: Do hire journalists to do the sites (a little self promotion here, we admit.) Here’s why. Journalists are used to cranking out stories quickly and on deadline. Others move too slowly. But don’t be afraid of involving brand fans in your website; perhaps you could pay a small amount to customers who write an item for the site.
5. Self-criticism builds trust: Honesty is the key to making such a site work for the reader. While you won’t be bringing out negative things, you do want to deal with negatives. For instance, if your product was junk, and consumers rejected it, you need to admit it.
6. One senior approval: One person should be in charge of the news site, and report to a person who has some authority within the company. If senior management quashes all the fun stories, your site will be a bore and no one will read about it.
7. Guest essays: You need to encourage them from clients, staff and guest writers. This helps to build content, and build friends for your company.
8. Use analytic software: One of the forgotten benefits of company news sites is the analytic information you get. You can see if your competition is looking at your site.
9. Not just for big companies: Large multinational companies are naturals for these sites, as they have thousands of employees. But other smaller and mid-sized companies can launch smaller versions. Hotels can launch visitor guides. Office supply companies can launch sites relating to business and office needs. Restaurants can launch cooking, travel and recipe sites. Retailers can launch product-driven sites.
10. Use as a complement to your regular site. You don’t want to redesign your main site for this sort of information. Instead, you want this new site to complement what you are doing for you main site, and provide links back. So give it its own URL, or put it on a sub-domain.

Talk to us about your corporate news strategy. Call Black Cow editor Garland Pollard at 703-734-8602 for strategy and ideas.

Black Cow Press believes these sections are more important than ever. But beware; you must be careful that you don’t sell the sections so much that you forget to sell the actual newspaper. Here are some quick tips; please contact us if you need direction and ideas. Frankly, sometimes the idea and inspiration bank falls a bit flat, and you need help. In addition, while these ideas are general ones, you will need SPECIFICS for your individual market.

And remember. While special sections are NOT a loss leader, you can underprice a bit (though always offer a better deal to regular advertisers). Here’s why. Getting the advertiser to advertise JUST ONCE gets them back in your billing system.

• Regional promotions: Talk to the merchants on a street or district that needs store traffic and customers. It might be “Elm Street, Your Arts District.” You, the newspaper, essentially become the “revitalization” committee and bring everyone together. Offer two simple rates, one expensive size and one affordable one. Offer a free web page to help bring the customers together, and tell them that you will run 100 words about their business, if they get the copy to you. Remember, the web is cheap.
• Talk to your editorial staff: Your editorial staff is DESPERATE for additional pages and sections, as their edit hole has shrunk. As them if THEY have any ideas for special editorial sections. They will often have great ideas. Just don’t ask them to do your work, namely gathering the listings or copy.
• Thematic promotions: Themes always work. Consumers care little whether it is “National Car Repair WeeK” so stay away from junk like that. Instead, do a theme on hair salons, or art galleries, or repair shops, or antiques stores.
• More than once: When doing special sections, offer them a more-than one time rate. Or consider having a big promotion one week with larger ads, and then very small ads that run thereafter that would have only the business names. So if it is a Get Your Car Tuned! promotion, then a small tombstone ad with business names runs for weeks after with just the names of the businesses.
• Rescue old sections: Do you have a regular section that is falling flat? Reduce its frequency and redesign it as a one-off promotion. While at a daily paper, I took a crummy all advertorial real estate section and added some wire copy and turned it into a featured tabloid insert.
• Charity Case: Stay away from those smarmy “Don’t Drink and Drive Promotions” and anything that is negative. It won’t bring customers to your advertisers, and associates your retail store with something negative. Do consider doing a promotion with a local blood bank or Goodwill truck. The ad might be run by the charity, but the shopping center merchants pay to advertise that the truck will be there.
• Go back: Look at archives from 20 years ago to see what your newspaper was doing then in the way of successful special sections. Perhaps the nostalgia will help your retailer decide to try it again.

Email Chief Content Editor Garland Pollard for insight and quick ideas, or to bring him to your paper for a quick pep talk. Or call me at (703) 745-8602. Got a struggling daily paper? Be sure to read his 20 Ways to Save Your Daily Newspaper.

But the recent issues with Lockerbie could do damage, as Americans just cannot begin to understand the decision. Perhaps this role-play will help those who work in Scotland’s £4.0 billion tourist industry:

American: My customers want to cancel their trips!

Scot Tour Operator: It’s awful. Millions of Scots are outraged too, but in a democracy, that’s the breaks. I read where some Americans are angry Squeaky Fromme got out of prison this same week! I do know the Scottish government will think long and hard before something like this happens again. (Conversation ends, topic switches.)

This is an excellent opportunity for Scottish tourism, but they must begin a new conversation with the American traveler. So what do you do? Visit Scotland and the Scottish Tourist Board need to come up with tourism web content and themes that resonate with forgotten audiences. They must tell stories. Here are some of initial ideas:

1. Talk to the elites. Scotland should not be afraid of telling the story of its elites. Remember, millions of Americans saw Four Weddings and a Funeral and wanted to be at that Scottish wedding party RIGHT THEN. So even smaller stately houses with very minor titled Scots have enormous appeal to Americans. Remember that stately houses in the U.S. are small, and no one has a title. Visit Scotland needs a multi-faceted program to talk one-to-one to them, and not just sell them Scotch whiskey and overpriced golf tours. By the way, Donald Trump holds no appeal to this crowd.
2. Do not ignore Lockerbie. There will certainly be some who want to play down the Lockerbie anniversary, but don’t run away from it.
3. Tell stories of Scots who left for America. Through American history, there are thousands of notable Scots and those of Scots descent who made history in the United States. These characters appeal to every part of the political spectrum, from super-rabble rousing “Give Me Liberty” patriot Patrick Henry to the liberal Virginia Democrat Sen. Jim Webb.
4. Show them Adam Smith, capitalism and industry. Scotland is the birthplace of capitalism and has a history of finance, banking and entrepreneurship and Enlightenment figures like Smith and David Hume. This is a tourism message that resonates with America’s right, and with every business owner in the United States. Any tourism content that stresses Scotland’s invention of capitalism would work perfectly in the U.S. and help to reinvigorate the beloved image of the Scottish entrepreneur. In tight times, it’s hard to justify a golf trip, but a trip with golf that includes Scotland’s intellectual leadership? That’s bankable. Plus, think industry, from New Lanark to Firth of Forth bridge and Tunnock’s Bakery.
5. Talk to the beer drinkers. The “real ale” movement that swept the British Isles had a different effect in the U.S. In the U.S., prohibition closed most regional breweries and thousands of brewpubs opened up in the U.S. The millions who go to these brewpubs are a perfect audience for Scotland tourism. Currently, the drinking of Scotch is the alcohol most promoted, and there is nothing wrong with that. But the “real ale” crowd (they call it beer) would do different things; hiking, outdoors and biking. Web content needs to be centered around regional food, outdoor activity and authentic experiences.
6. Use the clans. Scotland’s clan leaders have enormous influence within the class of Americans who claim descent from clans. The sort of American who goes to Scottish games and celebrates Scottish heritage cannot be put on a political spectrum, but you can say easily that there are two parts to it. There is the more liberal academic Scotia-file, the sort of person who admires the folk music and the small nuances of culture of Scotland. And then there is Caber Tossing American, the rough-exterior American who goes to Scottish games and loves to dress the part. This Caber American appreciates the boldness of the Scots. Both audiences see Scotland as the Pilgrimage of a Lifetime.
7. Tell the story of medicine: Scotland is the birthplace of modern medicine. Tourism that speaks to today’s physicians would help to change the message. The American physician is overwhelmingly male and of course, wealthy. They long have appreciated Scotland for golf, but touching the history of early medicine in web copy and public relations would help to inspire them in a  different way. Is there continuing education for doctors and nurses? Publicize any and all of it.
8. Continue to promote architecture and design: The mania for collecting, crafts, architecture and design goes to every level in the U.S. Scottish tourism officials have done a good job over the years promoting this, but more can always be done. The key here is to highlight the people working in these fields today.
9. Enlist the Presbyterian Church. The Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. encompasses liberal congregations and conservative, and many in between. The Scottish tourism community needs to connect with all factions of the church leadership, to encourage visits relating to Scottish church history. The Scottish Reformation is an exciting period, and the hundreds of thousands of devout Americans who are inspired about it can literally walk in the footsteps of John Knox, and a slew of newer evangelists like William Irvine. And it is not just Presbyterians. Americans of recent years have drawn inspiration from St. Columba, Iona and a new sort of Celtic Christianity represented by the Iona Community. It’s all very Eric Liddell, and evangelical America eats it up. This is a large audience not only in the U.S., but in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They all will still travel to Scotland, if encouraged.

About the Author: Chief Content Editor Garland Pollard has worked in tourism content development in Florida and in his native Virginia. He has spent much time in Scotland. As a child, he personally heard Scottish historian and writer Nigel Tranter tell the story of the theft of the Scone Stone, and various other Scottish nationalist stories. Email Chief Content Editor Garland Pollard for insight and ideas. Or call me at (703) 745-8602.

The Temptation in Boca Grande, Florida. Unique restaurants are part of the tourism mix that makes a destination worthwhile.

Hint: It’s about finding the cool stuff, and making cult favorites out of the mundane

Everyone has to brand these days. It started with product brands, then service brands. Now we all have to have a personal brand. And cities now talk about “branding” themselves. Good earth. Can’t we just go to work?

In the old days, it was enough that the Chamber of Commerce came up with slogan, but now even cities have to have a brand “personality” that will “resonate” with “key audience.” And not just one brand; because of competing turfs, a city (and region) might have a tourism brand AND an industrial development brand, both in conflict. It’s all gone a bit too far.

That is not to say you don’t want to think of branding when you promote your city to visitors. But the goal of a local brand is not an end in itself. Instead, the goal is attracting visitors AND encouraging trade and development. Branding is but a small tool, it is the last step in the process, not the first. The real work in attracting visitors is in coming up with product, so that you have something to sell to visitors.

In big cities and in tourist destinations, this is easy; much of the work has been done, though often, small-minded groups focus too much on the obvious, and miss the great stuff.  But smaller communities don’t think they have the assets. And so they feel inadequate.

They don’t need to. Here are a few thoughts:

1. Promote and preserve your history. While the local history museum might not be a giant draw (and might be only open two days a week), it is important for a larger reason; your history, layered over decades, is what makes your town unique. It is that collective memory that reaches outside your local area, and brings people in. You need historic buildings and stories about them on the web to make the city look and feel interesting. You would be surprised what people are interested in seeing. Even if you have a dying mall, it might be interesting to folks like Peter Blackbird and Brian Florence, who have the website www.deadmalls.com.
2. Get good photography. Distribute high-quality, rights-cleared photos of your destination for free. You need a number of types of images, and they should be downloadable, without rights management, as 300 DPI tiffs on your website. First, you need shots of the main streets and landmarks, and top activities. After you have these, and only then, do you spend for models and fancy images. If you can’t afford a professional, take hundreds of digital pictures yourself, and post them online.
3. Create lists. Make voluminous lists of parks, restaurants and attractions, and make sure it is on the Internet, and syndicated with an RSS feed. This seems obvious, but it is not. Many places rely on city parks bureaus to list parks online, but very often parks are run by local, state and federal agencies, and so the information is dispersed. Most visitor bureaus just make lists of art galleries and such, but you will want to create lists of breakfast joints, coffee shops, barber shops, boutiques, even service stations and car repair shops.
4. Find offbeat chain stores. Many cities do not have that many independent stores. So are there chain stores that are interesting? In Lancaster County, Virginia a Little Sue convenience store was loved for its fried chicken. Does your McDonald’s do more volume than any other location in the state? Whatever is unique, promote it. If Sam’s Exxon has the “coldest Budweiser anywhere” you should get them to make a T-shirt to sell to twentysomethings.
5. Create icons. The old proverb “remove not the ancient landmark your father has set” is your new motto. You need to be an advocate for public art. If all your town has in the way of public art is a muffler man, a giant chair, or a cool hamburger joint sign, promote it! I think about Gloucester County, Virginia. A small African-American roadhouse restaurant, W.J. Stokes, had a soft drink sign that said “Don’t Hate, Communicate.” It was a local landmark; installation art, really. While the building was modest, everyone knew the sign, and would repeat it as they drove by. It gained further attention as it was featured in a Peace Frogs T-shirt. The fashion brand and retailer Peace Frogs is headquartered in Gloucester.
6. Sell your people. I was told this from one of my former co-workers. The idea is that if you don’t have any tourism product, you need to sell your people. That means restaurant cashiers, shoe repair folks, convenience store clerks and fishing boat captains. Think Floyd the Barber; find unique folks who give your community identity. Promote them. Make them local celebrities in your photos (see #2). Many times, local officials take these folks for granted, and forget that they might have appeal far beyond their immediate circles. For example, college kids turn waitresses and cooks into celebrities; ask college kids what bars have “characters.” Remember, when people travel, they remember who they see. (Read the BrandlandUSA post 14 Ways to Save Your Casual Service Restaurant. It tells of the importance of characters to a town’s identity.)
7. Think of alternative attractions. Does your small county seat have a weekly court day where small claims are adjudicated? Promote it. Do churches and public schools (see next item) have Saturday bazaars and pancake breakfasts and fish dinners? Promote them. Ask local high school and college students what they think is funky or fun to do in your destination. They can help you spot cult favorites and inside jokes.
8. Churches draw out of town visitors. Europeans, in particular, are fascinated by American religious music, particularly gospel. I learned this two decades ago when British friends came to Virginia and said that they had to visit a black, Southern church. In the black community, congregations travel for revival week, gospel sings and other activities. Go one step further than compiling a list of local churches for the front desk at the Hampton Inn. Instead, meet with local ministers and ask them what sort of special programs (choir, healing) there are that might be interesting to a visitor. Promote your attractions to groups coming to town to do mission work. And don’t forget to give out your tourism information to mothers-of-the-bride. Typically, a big wedding can attract over 100 visitors to a small town. These guests will go out drinking after the rehearsal dinner, play golf on Saturday and might even have a last minute gift purchase.
9. A slogan is not a brand. Call your destination by its legal name. Can we please get away from all of these attempts to rename places by slogan? For instance, Florida’s Gulf Islands is the name for the Bradenton and Longboat Key area. But they don’t want to push the name Bradenton, so they call it Florida’s Gulf Islands.
10. Be an advocate for local issues. Ensure public access to waterways. Speak up in favor of park improvement projects. Serve on landscaping and civic improvement committees. Help with the farmer’s market. Work with your local health inspectors on improvements to hotels. While you should never appear political (and stay away from tax-raising, please!), people do expect that people who work in the tourism industry to have opinions.

Need help on your destination? Talk to Garland Pollard at Black Cow Press. Call him at 703-745-8602 or email him at Garland Pollard. He also talks to civic groups, associations and conferences about tourism issues and tourism development.