Photo By John Hoff First and foremost, Pat Carney of the Carney Group doesn't want his marketing expertise to be "conflated" into the reputation of Northside Marketing Task Force, which is merely one of many clients. Some of Carney's super HAPPY clients include Mitchell Construction, click here for an example of a website. (I love the use of "safety orange" in the design)
Carney stated, in so many words, he had NO FREAKING IDEA what he was getting into when he accepted a relatively simple assignment from NMTF to produce a website to market North Minneapolis, a neighborhood which is, er, COMPLICATED, to say the least.
NMTF turned out to be a toxic hornet's nest of intense interpersonal conflict and endless committee this, committee that, and oops now the committee makeup has changed. AGAIN. Try being a contractor under such circumstances.
However, instead of sending me a ticked-off email about my mentions of Carney's efforts in the same bloggy breath as the efforts of the NMTF, Carney invited me and some friends to wine and cheese at a semi-regular Friday "salon" held at their 837 Glenwood Office.
Carney is like that. He is open and communicative, happy to let things flow in spontaneous and creative directions, like a conversation with clever people flows, especially when lubricated by much wine. Carney takes enormous numbers of pictures, then casually tosses the pictures up on a website and doesn't really mind, he says, if somebody uses the picture for blogging or news coverage.
Hey, it's all good. Pat Carney is just LIKE that. He's fun and open and communicative. Unlike SOME people.
The offices of the Carney Group are...
...eclectic and spectacular and remind me, oddly, of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.
I've been there, like, FOUR TIMES. A law professor once asked me why I had toured Monticello FOUR TIMES and I answered, "To engage in worship of Thomas Jefferson to the point of idolatry." She told me how FLAWED Jefferson was and I said, well, that was part of my attraction: that a flawed and imperfect person could be capable of such sublime thought and creativity.
Like Jefferson, Carney's creativity is one with his building. Like Jefferson, he participates in his local government: he's a member of the Harrison Neighborhood Association.
"You've got to be!" he told me. To get ANYTHING done in a neighborhood, he said (and I agreed) you have to be involved in your local neighborhood association. From a window, Carney pointed to a property across the street and outlined visions of a farmers market. He pointed to International Market Square and mentioned how that place IS IN NORTH MINNEAPOLIS. North Minneapolis (NoMi) needs to claim a place like that, as part of its image.
Now how shall I put this, without violating any confidences? I told Pat Carney if he showed me the website he'd designed for the Northside Marketing Task Force--without formal, written permission to do so--there could be some kind of legal trouble. And I had a duty to tell him that, I thought.
Well, Pat Carney didn't want any TROUBLE. He is creative, but also a businessman and therefore instinctively prudent. But this was a case of "mi casa es su casa." If guests wandered around and LOOKED at things, what was he supposed to do? Intensely police his guests? That's really not his style. (Laughing hysterically, THAT might be his style)
So I wandered around. I looked at things. Other people may have looked at things, too, but I will only be responsible for MYSELF and I'll keep others out of the heat unless those individuals (who may be hypothetical and imaginary, who knows?) want to come forward on their own... which, if they are figments of my imagination, THEY CAN'T.
Yes, I think now I've sufficiently de-clarified matters.
So, in regard to the website designed for the NMTF: it's a good-looking website. The images do more than document, they celebrate the neighborhood. Relatively ordinary (but fun) get-togethers become photographic art, icons of neighborly good feeling. There are many things to click on and explore, a feature which will hopefully hold the attention of the casual browser who will get caught up and wonder, "Is there more...what's over here? Oh, that topic sounds interesting..."
The website needs more CONTENT but that's not really the job of the Carney group. They've got the house built, as it were, now people just need to move in and live there.
Could one make criticisms of the website? Oh, undoubtedly. But the mild criticisms of one of my (possibly imaginary) companions that evening were completely different than the stuff I would jump on. For example, saying "MY North Minneapolis." Well, my (fantasy?) friend thinks the whole "my thing" is "worn out."
Huh, I thought. THAT never would've crossed my mind. Yeah, put something like this cool website in front of a committee, and they will pick it apart, piece by piece. And that's the problem: this is not a new kind of soft drink. This is a neighborhood, older than any of us who are alive, a community with overwhelming levels of complexity and innumerable strong opinions.
How do you MARKET an entity like that? I say: If you want to market it, somehow you need to be able to say: here is money. Here are some broad criteria, which we've miraculously managed to agree upon. NOW JUST DO IT.
If you decide on marketing details by a committee, the (expletive) thing will NEVER get done. Somebody will say, "Let's put the nice older lady who has been here umpteen years on a billboard" and somebody else will say, "Well, if you're going to have a billboard of her, then you need a billboard of a certain young man who stopped being in a gang, and pulled himself up to assistant manager at a fast food place." And then somebody else says, "But that's your nephew!" And then the response is, "You have a problem with that, BITCH?!"
Academic studies must exist on the marketing of cities and neighborhoods. This is the kind of thing one should study, intensely, before wading in thinking, "They will greet us as liberators and throw flowers in the street."
This is what I said to Carney: Let us suppose, hypothetically, EVERY CRITICISM EVER MADE ABOUT THE WEBSITE IS TRUE? OK, I'm still left with SO WHAT?
A website that markets our neighborhood, into which content can be poured to compete with the negative messages in the media, is still better than nothing. Consider: In 1939, some units of the Polish cavalry used HORSES and BICYCLES. But which is worse: going up against Panzer tanks with horses and bicycles, or just throwing up your hands and surrendering?
At the table--amid bottles of wine and platters of cheese--I viewed a booklet passed around with crisp, concise, expressive writing and great photographs of the history of North Minneapolis, which flowed naturally into some exciting developments in the present moment. I was excited to see things I recognized and knew well, like the Hawthorne Eco Village.
Evan Reminick of Amalgam put his laptop in front of me and showed me a presentation he'd put together about ideas to market North Minneapolis--a MASSIVE amount of material, and he had done this FOR FREE, it wasn't even part of the CONTRACT.
I saw a particular line of text in his presentation and thought how that idea was very similar to my thesis of "Market and Romanticize The Struggle." Evan said he'd read my ideas about marketing North Minneapolis. (NoMi)
"Did my ideas influence you?" I asked.
"Everything I read influences me," he answered, nimbly, but he followed up by saying I was one of a very few people who had done any substantial theorizing about approaches to marketing North Minneapolis beyond merely "Let's accentuate the positive."
At some point--long after we'd consumed shots of exotic guifiti, both straight up and altered with "sugar in the raw"--long after exploring the website, (maybe that was just me) and flipping through the booklet, and checking out Pat Carney's amazing office which screams success, competence, creativity--I tried to figure out how to put all the NoMi marketing pieces together, all the players I'd outlined in Part One of this blog post.
And this is what I came up with:
NMTF pays Carney the $5,000 he is owed for services rendered. NMTF then turns over the completed website, (lock, stock, barrel and password) to the ad hoc group NoMi. NMTF then disbands. Why? Because NMTF has managed to negatively brand ITSELF, mostly by inaction and an inexplicably paranoid attitude about controlling information.
So...
NoMi uses the Carney-created website to market North Minneapolis any way it sees fit, since NoMi appears to be the group most well-situated to do this, at least at present, but time is a-wasting.
Don Allen could play a role by using his considerable geeky technical skills in driving web traffic. If NoMi wants to become a formal organization, they can approach Don Allen, who also has experience in putting together non-profits.
Yes, other entities could be approached other than Don Allen, but Don Allen is a PLAYER and he is at the table. So to keep everybody happy, Don Allen should play a role. Don Allen has talked about a highly-developed ability to shake funds loose from business entities. For goodness sakes, give him (or his new organization) an opportunity to do what he says he can do.
NoMi should retain its current cohesive structure--which is the only freaking thing getting any effective Northside marketing done--but could open itself to contributions by members of the community, Don Allen, Johnny Northside blog, and any members of (the former) NMTF who want to contribute efforts, ideas, and resources.
Johnny Northside is pretty adamant about GETTING PAID if his writing is going to be at somebody else's direction. That's the only thing. Beyond that, my dance card is free and open to NoMi, Don Allen, or even the NMTF.
Individuals who have a BETTER plan, or who want to discuss aspects of the Friday night salon that I missed are free to use the comments section.
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