Last week, the Columbus Dispatch ran an article about the potential to expand and grow tourism here in the capital city with a new marketing push, and utilizing new marketing tools and ideas in the process. The article mentions that Experience Columbus, the website of the Greater Columbus Convention & Visitors Bureau (which is a great resource by the way), has rolled out a blog. Read the article excerpt below for the details and the link.
City urged to market Columbus experience
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Marla Matzer Rose
To stay ahead of the national convention-business competition, Astleford said, Columbus must define and communicate its assets. Experience Columbus has introduced a blog for people to share their Columbus experiences at www.experiencecolumbus.blogspot.com.
To read the full article, click here.
Unless I’m missing something, or unless this new blog is still in development, I don’t see the purpose behind setting this up. It’s nothing more than a guestbook right now where anyone can post a few thoughts or spam it with anything else they feel like posting in the comments section. Just because it’s set up using blogspot does not make it a blog. Especially if the functionality isn’t there.
My personal advice:
- Either set up a guestbook page if they want the type of information they’re collecting so far, or set up a private survey to gather worthwhile information on a variety of topics without risking people spamming just to get their information viewed by everyone else looking at this “blog”.
- Hire someone to set up a real blog with real content pertinent to visitor information in Columbus that is updated and maintained on a regular basis. Also, please update the generic blogspot template to make it look like it took more than a few minutes to set up. Experience Columbus is a nice looking site. I’m sure a template could be created to keep the blog looking similar in design.
- Look to the future if you want to be cutting edge and beat out your competition. Blogs can play an important role in marketing and distributing information, but you have to go above and beyond if you want to stand out against everyone else. You can’t just throw together a blog in 10 minutes and expect everyone to want to read it when they’ve got millions of other blogs fighting for their eyeballs.
The plans are in motion, and it’s good to see new things developing for Columbus, but I also hate to see things done half-assed.