October 2003 , Issue 22

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Each issue, various members of our staff and partners write in order to share with you the knowledge we have gained through our work.

Please feel free to send feedback to the contributors by clicking on their name. You can also send general feedback to newsletter@whittakerassociates.com. Enjoy!

By Pete Julius

Didn't we hire you to bring jobs into our community? How much new capital investment has been made since you have been with this organization? What are you doing to proactively market our community? How are our competing communities doing?

Do these questions sound familiar? Most economic development practitioners hear these questions from their boards on a fairly consistent basis. Wouldn't it be interesting to know how other professionals respond to these questions? Answers from the field could give us some very useful information. Which communities are most successful? What measurements do they use to gauge success? What practices work best? How do organizations get evaluated? In conjunction with IEDC, we are collaboratively working with economic development practitioners to find out the answers to these and several other questions.

We initially asked various top economic development officials across the country how to proceed with this project. In the course of these initial discussions, we discovered many sensitive issues that threw up difficult obstacles to obtaining accurate, not to mention, helpful results.

For instance, it may cost one community more to generate a lead than it does another community. If your board, or for that matter your community, ever heard that you were spending more per lead than another community, how much more pressure would be put on your job? The intent of this project is to assist organizations in finding out the best marketing practices and figuring out ways to measure the effectiveness of their marketing programs, not to create more trouble! Another struggle is that we discovered that there are few common practices or terminology within economic development. For example, how many different definitions exist for a lead? These are just a couple of the issues and obstacles that our research project with IEDC is trying to resolve. Our initial collaborations have also raised the following important questions:

• How do you track leads/results? Where do they come from?
• How do you quantify leads?
• What are your primary and secondary measures?
• How do you currently measure results?
• What are your direct/indirect marketing costs?
• What are your biggest challenges? Where do you need the most assistance?

We facilitated a discussion group at the recent IEDC conference in Cincinnati to tackle these questions. Fifteen people, a mix of economic developers and consultants from small communities to large metro areas, attended the forum. These were some of the key points and questions raised in our discussion:

• There are no common definitions within economic development
• There are no benchmarks to compare marketing effectiveness
• There are no best practices for economic development
• How do you determine what to spend on which marketing strategy, where do you spend it, and for how long into the future do you plan?
• Does the structure of your organization make a difference (i.e. public/private, attraction/retention, etc.)?
• How do you get on the short list and what do you need to do to close the deal?
• What marketing strategies and what combinations produce the greatest results?
• What gets done internally and what gets done externally?

Of course, these are just a few of the major areas that need further discussion. Over the course of the next year in conjunction with IEDC, we will continue to collaborate with economic developers to gain a better understanding of the best marketing practices and how to measure their effectiveness. The results will not only benefit economic developers, but consultants, too, as we learn to better assist you with your marketing efforts. Our next steps in this research project fit the following calendar:

1. Over the next couple of months we will compile and distribute an initial electronic survey to focus and define appropriate questions and their wording for the main survey.
2. We will present & discuss our results at the 2004 IEDC Leadership Summit in St. Petersburg, FL.
3. We will compile the main survey, based upon results from the Leadership Summit forum.
4. We will send out the survey around March of 2004.
5. We will present the results of survey at the 2004 IEDC Annual Conference in St. Louis, MO.

We strongly encourage you to participate in this project. In addition, we will do our best to get everyone involved. IEDC's participation in this project will help us accomplish this feat. If you have any questions and/or wish to be an active voice in this project, then please feel free to email me (pete.julius@whittakerassociates.com). Your participation and sharing of knowledge will help to produce the best results for this project.

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By Kate Baxter

For those of you who have not heard of it, IAMC (Industrial Asset Management Council) has been formed in the wake of Corenet getting just too big. On September 7-10, I attended my third IAMC conference. This was only the third conference for this organization, and each one gets better. We have been following IAMC from its inception in our search for educational, networked organizations in which our clients participate.

As you may know, Corenet has become home to high cost suites, with organizations spending big bucks to get attendees to visit their event. Often, the crowd centers at the booth with the most free giveaways. Corenet is an example of a great place to network, if you are a machine. With attendance in the thousands, it is hard to bump into the same person twice. So creating a relationship, or even just being remembered, can be a feat.

IAMC is set up quite differently, and has created a few interesting rules to avoid becoming another Corenet. The number of corporate members to service providers is capped. Networking functions are set up at IAMC so everyone is at the same function, not segregated in little groups. All three conferences provided wonderful opportunities to meet people, get to know them and their organizations, and then bump into them again the next day. Dinner is still up to each individual, but there are gatherings set up before and after that everyone can attend. Each day, lunch is provided, so you don't have people coming and going at different times. Everyone comes to IAMC to network and to meet new people, so there is not the "seat saving" I have noted at other conferences.

Recreating the Beast? The IAMC board likely feels some pressure not to recreate the beast, a.k.a. Corenet. The feedback I have heard so far about IAMC is that the numbers need to remain capped. If there is a waiting list, so be it--half the appeal is that the ratio will be favorable for all. If that goes, so may many members.

The bottom line is that you can actually meet and talk to more people at IAMC, you don't have to pay big bucks to do it, and pretty much everyone you meet is willing to talk. IAMC has the market right now on a conference that is entertaining, educational, and still perfect for business.

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By Leigh Ann Howe

Plateau. Has the Internet hit a plateau in terms of its functionality? There is no doubt the Internet has transformed the way we communicate, shop, find information and do business. Today more than 600 million people use the Internet to email, search, chat, buy books, and download music, among other things. In 2003, it is estimated that $3.9 trillion in business transactions will take place over the Internet. However, the Internet is built on infrastructure that is decades old. Soon, technologies will enable mobile computing, instant virus protection, storing huge amounts of data, and immediate content delivery. Can the Internet as we know it support such new developments?

PlanetLab. To prepare for these additional burdens on the Internet, companies such as Intel and Hewlett Packard, in cooperation with universities across the country, including MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, have been working on a support project called PlanetLab. This project sits on top of the Internet and promises to make it more robust, spam free, and virus free, while building faster and smarter surfing capabilities. Currently, PlanetLab pools the resources of about 160 networked computers in 16 countries, with plans to increase that number to 1,000 machines. The intention is to extend the infrastructure of the Internet, lower the barrier of entry to development on the Internet, and deploy a new class of services. Right now, PlanetLab is a testbed for many new technologies and applications that can be tried out globally without affecting the Internet that we depend on.

Projects. Some of the live projects in the PlanetLab pipeline could be killer applications in the future commercial arena. Here are a couple of examples:

• NetBait, led by Intel, models the spread of worms and viruses while testing out mechanisms of defense.
• CoDeeN, led by Princeton University, protects web servers from overload by intercepting a sudden spike in traffic and rerouting it to a backup server.

Sources and More Information.

• www.technologyreview.com - MIT Technology Review Magazine
• www.planet-lab.org/php/overview.php - PlanetLab website

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By Jeff Vedders

www.census.gov: Such a simple web site address for tons of information. Although this site has enough information for several newsletter columns, I'd like to share two areas of interest, the Census 2000 data and the Economic Census.

Census 2000

The Census 2000 web site at www.census.gov/main/www/cen2000.html contains all of the information pertaining to the last U.S. census. With it, you can obtain demographic information from the macro level (state) all the way to the micro level (street address). Although the amount of information may appear daunting, a few quick links will allow you to get information quickly. For example, a link on the first page to State and County QuickFacts will give you the most requested population and business statistics. When you are ready to look for in-depth data, click on the American FactFinder to find data all the way down to the census block level. Several preformatted searches for data sets will help you with searching, or you have the option to do custom searches. For example, if you're interested in commuting statistics, you can pull down Employment Status and Commuting to Work from the Basic Facts box at the top of the screen.

Economic Census

The Economic Census is done every five years. with the last available census in 1997. The 2002 census is currently underway, but the first report won't be available until March 2004. The Economic Census tracks the number of businesses, value of shipments, annual payroll, and the number of paid employees for each NAICS code. This information is tracked at the state, county, metropolitan, and zip code levels. The census also compares the current figures to the previous figures. You can use this to see changes in the number of businesses for each NAICS code. If you don't know the exact NAICS code for the industry you're tracking, you can drill down. For example, if you click on the manufacturing category, it will take you to the corresponding 3 digit NAICS codes. From there you will be able to choose the appropriate category to get to the 6 digit NAICS code.

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