Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Durham’s Restless Innovator

Restless is a good word to describe the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau (DCVB) and the trait Durham’s marketing agency one of the most innovative in the nation.

Part of the challenge of publicizing a community to external stakeholders including visitors, newcomers, event planners, location scouts etc. is making sure to also empower internal stakeholders including residents, neighborhoods, other messenger organizations, local officials, businesses and university leaders with the same information.Capture

The Durham News Service (DNS,) another DCVB innovation, will become even more accessible when it launches today as a website.

Stakeholders will now have one dashboard (www.durhamnewsservice.com) that can be added as a tab to browsers or kept handy and accessed at will as a centralized, near-real-time resource for the latest news about Durham whether from local or national news sites, the community-wide calendar, blogs, other newsletters and of course DNS news releases.

It will be the place to go to stay in-the-know without waiting for weekly eNews or twice-weekly “Where Great Things Happen” emails or weekly community-wide calendar snapshots. Of course, those options as well as RSS feeds will still be available.

For nearly 100 years, destination marketing organizations (DMOs) like DCVB served as repositories of information that was then dispensed in response to inquiries or as part of promotions or in annual reports and newsletters.

Distribution frequency varied over time from annual, semi-annual, quarterly or monthly but then in the mid-1990s, everything changed. Early adopters like DCVB used the Internet not only to launch information much more frequently but at the same time make as much information as possible available self-serve, 24/7.

Things sure didn’t get any easier, they just got a whole lot faster and real-time. DCVB isn’t just a “fast-follower,” it continues to be remains an innovator in the worlds of destination or community marketing and community organizations.

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