Art Walk in Hillsborough, NC

Smallwander.com is hosting it’s monthly teleconference this upcoming Monday, Nov 24, from 10 to 11 am.  The topic is “Do downtown promotions = dollars downtown?

I particularly would like to explore why Hillsborough NC’s recent “Ladies Night Out” promotion was successful.  On a rainy Thursday night, hordes of women descended on the town and bought like crazy in the shops.  If you have similar stories about how special events translate to dollars in the shops, please think about them beforehand and share them with us.

Panelists will include Amy Wilmoth, a freelance marketing consultant for small businesses in the Triangle area of North Carolina, Elizabeth Read, Executive Director of the Alliance for Historic Hillsborough, Eddie Ide, President of Newton Merchants, Inc. of Newton North Carolina, and Greta Lint, tourism consultant.

We will be inviting town representatives in our smallwander network.  People will be able to either call in via telephone or listen in over the web.  They can also type questions to us.

Our next smallwander.com seminar will be an open discussion about planning special seasonal events in small towns.  With the holiday season approaching, many towns plan Christmas parades and home tours.  How important are they for your downtown?  Share your experiences with other downtown managers and tourist officers who are hoping to initiate these types of events.

Read Phil Lanning’s article about it in The Sun.

I am presenting with Greta Lint at an NC Small Town Economic Prosperity (STEP) program training event.  Greta is giving a presentation titled “Using Tourism to Stimulate Your Town’s Economy,” including a marketing 101 segment.  My presentation, “Y-Web,” will touch on ways these communities can use technology to promote their towns.

The NC STEP program is sponsored by the North Carolina Rural Center to support small towns under 10,000 that are sturggling to overcome economic hardship through training, technological initiatives, and other strategies.

New Website, smallwander.com, Promotes Small Towns and Offers Training for Merchants, Leaders
05-30-2008

HILLSBOROUGH, NC – Searching for travel information about small towns? A new Website, www.smallwander.com, has just been launched to help you. It features charming walkable towns with fewer than 10,000 people, cultural or historical heritage and locally-owned businesses, including accommodations. Towns must feature a distinct viable downtown, not one spread out or one with lots of empty store-fronts.

The idea is that you can park your car, wander, shop, eat and spend a day or two without having to get back into your car until you leave the town…

[Rest of article]

This is the first podcast of our monthly teleseminar series. This seminar was held on January 28, 2008. Our guest was Carol Wiersma of the Mississippi Valley Partnership. We discussed the value of creating travel partnerships among communities.

Click here to download the MP3 file.

Click here to subscribe to the podcast on Itunes.

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.

How retail, hotel, and food and beverage taxes can spur economic development

Phone/web seminar

February 25, 2008

10:00 am to 11:00 am

We have invited small town and county representatives to discuss how retail, hotel, and food and beverage taxes have been put to use in their communities. We’ll have about 4-8 panelists, and I’ll try to field questions from the people on the call. Elizabeth Read, Executive Director of the Alliance for Historic Hillsborough (NC) will tell us about Hillsborough’s 1% meals and beverage tax that goes to Hillsborough’s Tourism Board. Laurie Paolicelli, Executive Director of the Chapel Hill/Orange County Visitors Bureau Orange County (NC) will tell us how hotel taxes go toward tourism in her neck of the woods. We also hope to discuss how retail sales taxes can be linked to a buy local campaign.

 We want to thank Carol Wiersma of the Mississippi Valley Partnership (http://www.mississippi-river.org/) for being our guest for Smallwander.com’s first seminar, “Creating Travel Partnerships.” The phone/web conference was held yesterday, January 28, at 10 a.m. Please stay tuned for upcoming seminars on small town tourism topics. We’ll also be posting the audio file from the conference as podcast.