Back in the saddle today after an eight hour fight with my 18 month old computer. I had to reformat the hard drive, reinstall all my software, back up gigs of data, etc. Fun stuff.
I assume the reader of my column today will realize I am talking about net new job creation over the past 10 years. There has been growth in certain industries and decline in others but the net new job growth has been 40k over 10 years of which 18k are in health care, education and public administration.
By the way, I strongly believe the premise of my column which is that if communities were witnessing solid economic growth, they would be less angry (I say less) about the rationalization of public services. After a large plant closure, the worst thing you could do is go in and cut a hospital or other public service. It’s starts to look like you are piling it on.
I see that the Greater Halifax Partnership has been singled out for its use of Web 2.0 for economic development.
The Greater Halifax Partnership agency began its presence in the Web 2.0 environment almost two years ago with its Facebook page. Since then, the agency has adopted a full complement of social media marketing tools on their site which will play a role in their relatively new marketing plan. Visitors to the site are able to access:
o A LinkedIn profile
o A Facebook Fan Page
o A Twitter feed
o A blog
o A Flicker page
o A YouTube Channel
There are no perfect economic development agencies but the GHP does a nice job of trying to stay ahead of the curve in a variety of areas. The interesting thing about this is that all those Web 2.0 activities combined are very low cost – if they are done right. You can leverage video done for other purposes, senior staff can take turn blogging, the Twitter feed can act as a real time feed on related activities. Good stuff.
Stephen Lund shared some of NSBI views on ED success in today’s TJ. In summary:
1) Focus. Strive to be the best and be known in one sector
2) Anchors:using the shopping mall example to emphasize it is not one or the other but a balance of both large anchors and smaller companies for a healthy economy
3) People: Particularly their loyalty and commitment which is a huge benefit for business
None of these ideas are new and in fact could have been plucked from the pages of David’s blog. However, in typical NB fashion, perhaps now that someone who has left the province is talking about what we should be doing, maybe more people will listen.
I will be asking political candidates who knock on my door to explain their party’s ED strategy. If I hear (and believe) some of the stuff above, they’ll get my vote.
The reason I have 3 hard drives all loaded, set to go. Lot faster and easier to transfer between master and slave. Learn something every day eh?