Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Selling the Quad Cities

Q-C Visitors Bureau earns state grant -QCTimes
The State of Iowa gave the QC CVB 5 grand towards a $10k advertising campaign in Chicago. I doubt $10,000 buys all that much time on WGN radio, but at least its something.

Lately I've been in the mood to do something proactive to showcase the area. That was one of my reasons for yesterday's post. In light of the CVB's out-of-state (kind of) advertising, I decided to engage in a bit of free advertising for the Quad Cities on the internet.

SkyScraperPage.com is a website for "skyscraper and urbanism enthusiasts." One of the main features of their site is the forum section, which has thousands of posts per day. They have a section devoted entirely to photo threads of various cities around the world, so I posted this thread of Quad Cities images. As you can see, so far people seem impressed.

The CalgaryPuck Forum is a message board website for Calgary Flames fans. I started reading them when the QC Flames were first announced because it was interesting to see Canadians reaction to their farm team moving from Omaha to a place many of them had never heard of. Quite a few QC fans participate on the forum, providing Calgary fans a look into their prospects. The site also has an Off Topic section, so I posted the same thing there that I posted on SkyscraperPage. It also got good reactions from the Calgary folks. Here's that thread.

As of 7:40AM, 200 people have read the post on SkyScraperPage, and 214 have read the post on CalgaryPuck. Keep in mind that these have barely been up for 12 hours at this point. If even 1 or 2 of these people decide to stop in and check out the QCs as they drive by on I-80 sometime, I figure it was worth the time I spent choosing images from my collection and uploading them. There are a couple of other sites I'm considering posting this to; I'll mention them if I do. I know I'm not the only one who enjoys seeing out-of-towners' impressions of the Quad Cities.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another great thing about Davenport is that someone can apply for a job at city hall and lie all over their application for employment and get away with it.

Unknown said...

We need to sell this area to our own residents as much as to outsiders. When someone moves here, they usually have an open mind. But if all they hear is negativity, their mind will certainly change. 10:58 provided a nice example of what I'm talking about.

I'm not saying to gloss over problems or anything. I'm just saying, we need to give new residents their own chance to make up their own mind. I'm convinced if we do, most (not all) will have a positive view.

Anonymous said...

Nice work, QCI. It's always beneficial to have nice photos like this of our area out there for others to see. Every little bit helps.

Anonymous said...

QCI - good work. You really made the Quad Cities look like an appealing place to visit or live - which it is.

Anonymous said...

QCI: Have you ever tried to photoshop all the downtown skylines together to get a feel for what the QC would look like if it were contiguous?

I've always thought that would be a cool project.

Anonymous said...

If you have Photoshop, the following will get you started. Don’t know if this is the best way, but I have used it to merge images.

File. Automate, photo merge.

QuadCityImages said...

I lack photoshop skills, but I may know a few people that could work on this idea.