1. How to Build a Community Brand in the Age of Social Media

2. Outline What is Social Media? What is a Place Brand? How Social Media can Help you Build a Place Brand Examples of Great Place Brands Experienced through Social Media Appropriate Goals for Brand Building Using Social Media Action Steps to Build a Brand Using Social Media Q+A Appendix: Background on Social Media Tools

3. Your Host Raised in: Loves to visit: Vitals: Ben Wright CEO, Atlas Advertising benw@atlas-advertising.com www.twitter.com/atlasad Function: Executive Biggest question about social media: How will it change the nature of geography?

4. About Atlas Atlas Advertising helps economic developers reach national and international prospect and site selection audiences. We deliver branding, website development, GIS mapping, research, social media, and creative services professionally and with a staff experienced in economic development. Unlike firms with little or no economic development experience, Atlas Advertising uses a proven mix of economic development marketing tactics that generate interest from site selection audiences. Atlas Advertising is led by a former economic development practitioner and has worked with 60+ different economic development clients in 35+ states. Our approach and experience means that our campaigns generate an average of three to ten times the response of other campaigns. Featured clients: Indy Partnership State of Ohio Alabama Power Company City of San Francisco Bryan County, GA Savannah Economic Development Authority Electric Cities of Georgia

6. Content Services

7. Research Services

9. Commercial Property databases

10. Business databases

11. Data Search (Data Tab)

12. Other Data Management (Map Overlays)

13. Community Data Management

14. GIS System Analytics

15. GIS Data Reporting

16. Data Widgets

18. What is a place brand? The sum of all the characteristics, tangible and intangible, that make a development, city, state, or region unique.

19. How Social Media Can Help You Build a Place Brand

20. How Social Media can help you build a place brand It is a new channel for people to discover, read, and share information about your community. It can foster “many to many” dialogues about the most important issues and assets in your community. It can transform your board members, community advocates, and ordinary citizens into marketers (or critics) It facilitates relationships around information, issues, and assets in your community quickly, transparently, and flexibly.

21. Question: What are the things that are central to your brand? The heritage, reputation, and attributes of your community itself The heritage and reputation of your organization The information you have at the ready to tell a favorable story about your community relative to other locations The capability of your staff to be proactive and professional The network of influencers you have in your community that can mobilize around business expansion or retention

22. Which of these can’t be enhanced by a strong Social Media program? None!

23. Research about Social Media usage among location decision makers

24. What new media advancements have you seen that you think are valuable to your profession?

25. What social networks or tools, if any, do you use?

26. How frequently do you use each?

27. What is the applicability of LinkedIn to your profession?

28. What is the applicability of LinkedIn to your profession? “I have used it along with Hoovers to check who is LinkedIn and contact people for business meetings.” “I think it has good application. I have gotten proposals through this tool.” “Pretty low rated.” “It’s okay.” “I already have the contacts I need in my email – how is this different?” “Not much” “Good for seeking independent information.” “Good for finding contacts, and to keep in touch with peers.” Useful networking tool Don’t know yet.

29. Examples of Great Place Brands Experienced Through Social Media

30. Savannah, GA

31. Denver, CO

32. Bloomington-Normal, IL

33. Appropriate Goals for Brand Building Using Social Media

34. Recommended Goals Generate new prospect and investor inquiries Engage current prospects, stakeholders, investors, and the general public in economic development Move important community investment decisions forward Grow the reach of your organization by building your fan, follower, friend, web traffic, and connections base

35. What about negative comments? Building a brand using social media doesn’t create negative press. It you to manage and engage with that press. After much criticism for poor customer service, the direct-sell computer company earned the rather unfortunate moniker “Dell Hell.” (Googling the term results in a long list of links largely tied to customer dissatisfaction.) In response to this, Dell executives worked to improve customer relations and actively join in the conversation. Dell has even developed the property IdeaStorm—a community driven forum in which customers are invited to note problems, share suggestions with the company, and even assist fellow customers. Since then, some past critics have praised the company for their improvements and negative blog posts about the company have purportedly dropped from 49% to 22%. Read more

36. Action Steps to Build a Brand Using Social Media

37. Step 1: Create an online persona for your brand What are the attributes of your community itself? Great technology community? Low cost? Business friendly? Outstanding companies? What is the heritage and reputation of your organization? Have you made big deals happen? Have you led some big wins? What information do you have that others don’t have? What are you expert in? Is your staff proactive and professional? How can you show that? Who is in your network? How do they fit in to your community’s persona?

38. Step 2: Pay off your persona with real content. Take your community’s best attributes and seed or join the communities that have already formed around them. If your organization is a long time leader – act like it. Be authoritative. If you are an upstart, talk about things that push the envelope. Make all the information that you have that is legal to share completely available on your website. Make a big deal on social media of releasing it. Set a calendar to do so. Engage key staff members whose work can be made more efficient by social media to participate. Have them own key areas of your persona. Do the same thing with your network, including innovators, CEOs, and others who can own something valuable.

39. Step 3: Create reasons to engage/comment Be relevant – always tying back to how your persona meets the needs of your audiences: Be timely – don’t be the last one to post or comment on an important community issue. Be the first. Be different – take positions that only you can take. Augment them with information only you have. Be edgy, open, conversational – this is what people expect. After all, they are relating to a persona now.

40. Step 4: Give away real value that can be consumed or forwarded Inside information Customized research Tidbits from meetings Stories from the road Legislative updates Official positions

41. Step 5: Measure and Adjust What to measure: Numbers of connections, followers, friends How often your content is shared with others Website or blog traffic Number of conversations your organization is having How many people in your organization are participating Groups your organization is a part of

42. Step 6: What to stop doing to make time Attending meetings just to be “a good face for the community.” Newsletters for the sake of newsletters Printing boxes and boxes of brochures Attending non-industry specific trade shows Creating fluffy and traditional branding campaigns that are dismantled after a year because they are not relevant

43. Q+A

44. Contact Atlas Contact information: 2601 Blake Street, Suite 301 Denver, CO 80205 Contact: Ben Wright t: 303.292.3300 x 210 benw@Atlas-Advertising.com www.Atlas-Advertising.com LinkedIn Profile| LinkedIn Group | Twitter| Blog| Slidespace

45. Background on Social Media Tools

49. Your Fans

50. Status Updates

51. Inbox

52. Applications

53. Advertising

56. Who you follow

57. Who follows you

58. Mobile accesshttp://twitter.com

61. Your Contacts

62. Your Connections

63. Status updates

64. Groups

65. InMail Feature

66. Applications

67. Advertising

69. Video on YouTube can be viewed through their site, as well as embedded in websites, blogs and other locations throughout the web

70. Every minute 20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube

71. 51% of users are on the site weekly

72. YouTube is an independent subsidiary of Google and YouTube videos are searchable and viewable on Google

75. Subscriptions

77. Flickr also supports video upload

78. As of October 2009, it hosts more than 4 billion images

79. Flickr is owned by Yahoo!

82. Photo sets/collections

83. Photo descriptions

85. Launched 2009 – 500,000 users in first year

86. Integrated with facebook and Twitter

87. Badges

90. Integration with facebook

91. Integration with Twitter

92. Friends

93. Tips

95. There are over 200,000,000 blogs online

96. Blogs tend to rank high in search

97. Atlas blogs are hosted through Wordpress. Wordpress currently has 7,237 available plugins for things like sidebar polls, event calendars, Twitter integration, Share It and more

98. Blogs, in 2008, had 77.7 million unique visitors

101. Categories

102. Archives

103. Authors

104. RSS feed

105. About us page

106. Search