Floyd Allen

Smallwander.com stopped by Mt. Airy on March 13 for a brief visit. Members of the team hit all the hotspots suggested by the Visitor’s Center. You of course know that Andy Griffith grew up in Mt. Airy, so we checked out The Andy Griffith Collection located at The Andy Griffith Playhouse. Be sure to eat at Snappy Lunch, the only true Mount Airy establishment mentioned on the Andy Griffith show.

I personally appreciated the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History, where I learned about the Hillsville Massacre. Unbelievable. If you do anything, stand in the top floor of that museum and read a copy of the original newspaper article about this courtroom shootout in 1912 in nearby Hillsville, which left the entire law dead in the county. But, it really is more of a family-friendly place. Learn about the amazing Eng and Chang, the original Siamese twins.

And, make sure you visit the largest open-face granite quarry on the planet, the North Carolina Granite Corporation. I’m really just scratching the surface here.

The next Smallwander.com web/phone seminar will be next Monday, March 31, at 10 am. It’s going to be all about blogging, and other social networking tools. Our featured guest will be Anne-Marie Dany, publisher of the blog MyWeaverville.com. Anne-Marie also happens to be our Smallwander representative from Weaverville, NC.

Blogs, or web logs, are online electronic journals. Businesses are using blogs to build a personal relationship with their clients. Towns as a whole can do the same to attract tourists. As you might know, smallwander.com has two blogs, one to help towns communicate with one another, and one to communicate with travelers.  Right now, smallwander.com members are welcome to post on both blogs.

 We are inviting all of our featured towns on smallwander.com the ability to post on this blog. They’ll be able to post and edit their own messages directly, without any review on our part. We currently use a Wordpress blog hosted on Wordpress.com. Eventually, we’ll migrate the blog over to our upgraded site.

To our member towns–if you are new to blogging, experiment with it! It’s not much harder than sending out an email, except that it’s posted out there for the internet world to see. You’ll be able to add pictures, video, and audio, too. This might be your first step in setting up your own blog for your town. In fact, our next phone/web seminar, on March 31, 10 am, will be all about blogging. More details to follow.

I’m learning about this at the same time as you, so, we’re always open to suggestions. Please contact us at any time if you have any problems.