Beaufort County needs a better marketing program than it now has

June 02, 2016

At the May County Commissioners' meeting we were treated to a presentation by Martyn Johnson, the county's Director of Economic Development touting how much money is spent in the county by tourists. Hood Richardson challenged the data that were presented and Mr. Johnson indicated he would do some research on how the Department of Commerce comes up with the numbers and make a subsequent presentation.

You can watch the action here:

To his credit, Mr. Johnson is using state data from the Department of Commerce. Apparently be presumes it is correct. As we have said many times, the numbers defy common sense. For example, they always go up. Never down, no matter how the economy is doing. At the November 2012 commissioners meeting Warren Smith wrote a letter to the Board of Commissioners that demolished the bogus tourism numbers.

Click here if you'ld like to see how they concoct the numbers.

Note that the "travel industry, as used herein, refers to the collection of 16 types of businesses that provide goods and services to the traveler and potential traveler at the retail level…" Check with some local businesses and you'll have a hard time finding even one of them that has ever been surveyed, much less provided periodic data from their local business.

We think this is what Mr. Johnson should be about doing. We need barometers of economic activity in Beaufort County, not some statistical modeli ng from other places. For example, one motel manager in the county told us that most of their business is homeless veterans who qualify for VA benefits to pay for motel housing. That's got nothing to do with tourism. Another told us that a majority of their business comes from service workers who spend the night while working in the area, predominately at Potash Corp. Aurora. We ask one popular restaurant that has a franchise within an organization that does rather sophisticated market studies and they told us that most of their business is local, not transients (tourists). Yet under the TEIM model all of their sales are counted as "tourism."

In the same presentation at the commissioners' meeting Mr. Johnson talked about using internet websites to market the county. But market to whom? It seems to us that it is pretty important if the county, city and chambers of commerce are going to spend public dollars on marketing that they should have some solid data about who their marke t is. Counting the sales from sixteen business categories is not measuring what you need to know.

If Beaufort County is going to spend public dollars on "economic development" it has a duty to document how effective those dollars are being used and what specific impact they have. There is a real and compelling need for Mr. Johnson and the people he works with, including the Committee of 100, to come up with a system to measure what is happening to the local economy and specifically what is happening with key segments of our local economy. For ten years we have thrown over twelve million dollars into one rat hole after another. We finally got rid of the chief rat but we still don't have a good data system for measuring our local economy. That is amazing. Gary Brinn, do you not consider that "nonsense"?

One of the things that was obvious in Mr. Johnson's presentation on behalf of the Belhaven Chamber of Commerce was that while he and they were proposing internet marketing they apparently do not realize that internet marketing offers a resource that almost no other form of advertising offers…website can collect very detailed data about who is searching for what. Google became the largest business in world history by collecting and using that data. Ditto Amazon, who has now surpassed Wal-Mart as the world's largest retail seller. Now Wal-Mart is beginning to do the same thing, partnering with Amazon. Yet the specs the Belhaven Chamber posited for their website, which they wanted the county's taxpayers to foot half the bill, did not apparently require the website design to collect and compile such data. We ought to be able to do better than that. Let's hope Mr. Johnson does.

And as a footnote, we'll speak to something we know a bit about--maintaining a website. You can pay boatloads of money to build the greatest website in the world but if you do not have a strategy to get people to go to that website it is going to be money wasted. To be effec tive a website has to be constantly maintained. Note the picture of the county's current website. The top listed "news" event is dated Jan 22, 2014.

Source: Beaufort County needs a better marketing program than it now has