Small towns get attention at the Governor's Conference in North Dakota

North Dakota has a large rural population spread over a large geographic area. The entire state is undergoing an economic boom time, started by a wave of oil production. While the big cities have been the primary beneficiaries of the economic good times, smaller towns have a mixed outlook: some are doing very well, some are not.

North Dakota Governor John Hoeven headed up the Governor's Rural Community Summit in Minot to talk about small town issues. It was front page news on the Minot Daily News, and they gave terrific coverage to the event.

I was there to talk about marketing your small community as a destination. With an enthusiastic crowd that filled the room, we discussed some of the latest listening tools in social media, ways to find and work with online champions, and how to evaluate competing sites.

In order to be a destination as a small community, you have to engage your potential visitors more deeply. We talked about the continuum of engagement from commodities, to assets, to experiences, to finally renewal. At the highest level of engagement, your visitors know that their participation is part of a renewal of something valuable.

And no town is too small. To get all the people to see their town with new eyes, we worked through the 8 Elements of Rural Culture created by the Kansas Sampler Foundation.

The Get Social gals: @internkayla,
@legendaryND and Brianna

Together, we all discussed ways their towns could increase engagement, make more of their existing assets, and work to improve their online coverage.

The Department of Commerce also hosted a Get Social area. A group of staff people set up laptops in an informal area and just answered questions about social media and online tools. I helped out, and shared a lot of ways people could move ahead a few steps. Over and over, I shared my favorite advice about Twitter: follow smart people. If you follow smart people, Twitter will be a learning experience for you.