Technology Column: Why Philly Just Doesn’t Get the Internet.

With a town busting at the seams with technological talent why can’t the big marketing organizations of Philadelphia embrace the internet?

This is a question I’ve been asking myself for months now, over coffee, while I’m eating bagels, at work, feeding Maya, watching paint dry…etc. I know of at least ten web companies in town that provide internet marketing services to anyone with a budget. Center City District and the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce definitely have a budget, are definitely looking to promote Philadelphia but definitely dropping the ball.

The mentality seems to be this. I have a website. It’s a rather nice website and it’s spawned several smaller websites. Good website, breed like puppies and soon everyone will visit you and love you and come to Philadelphia.

The only problem with this is that I have to seriously hunt around to find these websites. There is zero, zilch, nada internet marketing going on with these beautiful and very useful homes of digital paraphernalia. If you don’t know the name of the organization you won’t find them. If you do a search on Google for “Philadelphia events”, you get Gophila.com, and a bunch of other “fun guides”, listing sites, and ticket venders… but nothing on the CCD and GPCC. This is easily fixed, no really, it’s called Adwords and it’s so simple to use that it’s become a cottage industry for people like myself.

Other than a complete lack of a Pay-Per-Click campaign (basic search engine marketing 101, people) most of these sites lack interactivity. When you’re talking about marketing an entire city, like Philadelphia, people who live here have a lot of opinions. A few of them are actually quite good ideas which you can glean, and use in your future projects. In fact you’re likely to find all sorts of people participating in a forum or blog and some of them will want to join your organization to help out. The trick is to provide great content (not mediocre) and to keep conversations rolling along.

These ideas are no different than traditional marketing and networking, used in the real world. The only difference is that it’s online and therefore more accessible to the very people you need to reach. So please… for the love of god, hire a Internet Marketing company to help you. At the very least get an overpaid consultant who will tell you to do what I’m telling you for free.