Improving county promotion discussed
By Steve Herring
Published in News on April 10, 2016 1:45 AM
The creation of a Wayne County communications department that would oversee advertising, media relations, assist with speech writing and even provide training for making public presentations and that would promote and market the county is being developed by Wayne County Manager George Wood.
It would require the county to hire a communications director, a position similar to one eliminated last year as a cost-cutting measure.
The proposal is one of the goals Wayne County commissioners discussed during their February planning retreat.
Wood, Tuesday morning, briefed commissioners on the proposal and his recent trip to Fayetteville to see how that city's award-winning communications department functions.
The board did not take any action.
Wood said he had wanted to go to a city or county of "some size" that had a good operation to see what the county should be looking at and at what others are doing in terms of better marketing of their city or county.
Commissioner Ray Mayo asked if a cost analysis had been completed for the county department.
One is being worked on now, Wood said.
"A lot of what you went over, we are already doing," Commissioner Wayne Aycock said. "Correct?"
"I would say some of it," Wood said.
Aycock also wanted to know if such a department would put the county in competition with the Wayne County Development Alliance and Wayne County Chamber of Commerce.
Wood said he had spoken to Development Alliance President Crystal Gettys about matching up skills sets so that there would be no overlapping. Also, the Chamber's focus is on promoting businesses and not county-specific things, he said.
Cities and counties do not rely on Chambers to do their branding, he said.
"One more thing that is unclear," Aycock said. "This is very similar to a position that we just did away with because of cost savings."
That is correct, Wood said.
"I think that what we are doing is revisiting that," he said. "We will have a much more limited staff (than Fayetteville). I believe they had five or six people. We are not going to have that big a staff, but we are either going to have to make a decision to contract for a communications director, or somebody who does that type of work, or we need to look at bringing somebody online to do that.
"What I need to know from you is whether you want to proceed on with that or not. If so, the other thing is we have got a job description for every job that they (Fayetteville) have. Now, ours will have to combine some of those because we are going to have a smaller number of people. I am ready to move forward with that. I need to know what you want to do."
Commissioner John Bell said going through Fayetteville is one thing, but suggested having Wood draft a plan for Wayne County so commissioners would know what the county would look like.
"One of the reasons that we wanted to do this, if you all recall, we have been talking for sometime about doing a better job marketing Wayne County," Wood said. "One of the things we wanted to look at is what should that entail? What specifically should we be looking at doing?
"We have had some discussion about whether we should contract this (communications director) out or whether we should do it in-house."
Wood said that board Chairman Joe Daughtery had looked at the cost of contracting those service out, and it appeared cost prohibitive. However, the board can discuss that further if it wants to, he said.
"They have Fayetteville TV 7," he said. "They live stream via Granicus. Granicus is a company that allows you to do live streaming. Ours (meeting videos), we send a disk, and it is put on TV, but not everybody gets cable. Some people are on Dish (Network), some on DirectTV and all of that. Streaming allows you to do it over the Internet. So think of it is TV over the Internet.
"We also do stream our meetings, but we don't stream everything that we do on the TV. That's the difference."
Like Wayne County, Fayetteville has a public educational government channel.
"They have Fayetteville in Focus, Connect, Play and Discover and Day in the Life," Wood said. "What they do in Day in the Life, they will take a particular department and show what an employee's job is and that sort of thing. They have public service announcements. They have a daily TV line-up, departmental video productions. So they will go in and determine with the department head what kind of videos they would like to have."
They are able to work those videos up to talk about key issues and other topics, Wood said.
"The other thing they do is media relations," he said. "They have print, TV and radio interviews, press releases, media queries, anything that comes in from the media they handle. Press conferences, they are responsible for setting those up."
It also handles all public information requests. In Wayne County those requests go through Marcia Wilson, clerk to the board.
Fayetteville also uses social media including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest, he said.
Website content is "a big part of where" Wayne County wants to get, Wood said.
Fayetteville has its own printshop, but Wayne County does not have enough printing needs to require one, Wood said.
It has an internal communications piece called Font Line where it does internal communications to city employees, he said. It also has a Manager's Messenger, Wood said.
"One of their corporate people is actually over branding," Wood said. "What they try to do there is all of their stationary looks alike, their business cards. It all has the same feel, and what we are trying to get to on our website where the background is all pretty identical it's showing the same branding of the county.
"But we have a way to go in terms of our stationary, business cards and things like that. On advertising they do some with digital billboards, some local print publications they are in. Then they do some paid ads on Facebook, some on radio, some on Fayetteville TV and local colleges. They are asking their board for more money this year for local advertisement."