When a new technology trend becomes established
Anya Codack
When a new technology trend becomes established it often has implications for investment attraction. It is now widely known, for example, that the web is the most important medium used by site selectors to gather information. A new rule of thumb arises from this - the quality of your website is a key factor in determining the success of your economic development program.
What characterizes a high-quality website? There are many facets to the answer but one principle has become clear: as a medium for communications, the site needs to be more than the sum of its parts.
That is, the site should have the ability to generate interest and activity beyond itself - beyond being simply a place where people can visit and find information. Your site should be the center of a wide and active network of interest.
This is where Web 2.0 comes in and social media bookmarking is one facet of Web 2.0 tactics. It can be used to enhance your website so that people can more easily discover, remember and share the information you publish about your community.
An example of a popular social networking tool called Add ThisBy providing easy to use and conveniently located bookmarking links on your website you can encourage visitors to add your website to their own social media sites, making your website a point of interest. Typical bookmarking sites include Delicious, Digg, Technorati, Furl, Simpy, Citeulike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Blogger, Facebook, Mixx, Propeller, Reddit, Slashdot, and LinkedIn.
Once added to a social bookmarking site, the link, and therefore your website, can be shared with other people who share the same interests or work in the same field. This opens up your information and stories to a whole new network of people who might not have found about you otherwise. Now it is possible that viral marketing about your municipality can take place.
Many site selectors have found social bookmarking sites an important time-saving tool because they, like everyone else, have a problem in finding relevant information and keeping track of it all.
As the bookmark is shared amongst a network of people and is imported or added to other people''s bookmark lists your website actually becomes more visible in a number of ways: First, your search engine rankings can improve due to the expanding number of links generated to your website. Second, many people use social bookmarking sites for Internet searches as the bookmarks have been tagged to identify the main content of websites, resulting in more relevant search results.
As social bookmarking services have matured and become more popular, additional features have been added, including ratings and comments, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers and e-mailing of bookmarks and web annotation.
For site selectors, access to such features adds to the competitive qualities of an economic development site by helping them organize their searches, find opportunities of high interest in the market and keep track of potential sites associated with their highest priorities.
Saving time, making it easy, making the information easily shared and searchable by category - these are the reasons why economic developers need to consider adding bookmarking tools to their websites. You can take advantage of these tools to extend your site into a network of information repositories that link users around the world. That is part of what competitiveness means today.