Is Aroostook County on the radar?

    This past week I attended a meeting at Northern Maine Development Commission to talk about the Maine Office of Tourism, The County, and how we might all work together to better facilitate tourism connections for Aroostook. Pat Eltman, director of the Maine Office of Tourism will be coming to the region in early December to present information about the office’s tourism program for 2010.     Accompanying her will be representatives from the PR firm, the media/marketing firm and the Web site/IT firm that the MOT has contracted with for this fiscal year. All the Chambers are being asked to invite three or four tourism-related businesses to attend, who may have an interest in furthering the conversation with the state. For those of you who haven’t seen her on TV, or met her, I must tell you, Ms. Eltman is a force. She’s enthusiastic, solution-oriented and determined. She has opinions to be sure, and she will share them. I believe it’s to Mr. Baldacci’s credit he appointed her as the state’s Director of Tourism. I digress.
    Our discussion focused on if we’re “on the radar,” and if we aren’t, what can we do for more representation as a region? My general developing thoughts related to Aroostook, our part in the tourism industry, and our relationship with the MOT is do we really want to be marketed as part of the coastal/tourism niche? We aren’t Freeport, and we don’t have a coast. Lighthouses are pretty, but why be placed in the same basket? Why aren’t we celebrating we aren’t southern Maine? Along with those tourism dollars comes an all together different life. Why worry we don’t get the same exposure?
    I should preface these remark: I do think people know we’re here. The County isn’t a phrase or a place everyone out there in southern Maine hasn’t heard of. I do not believe it. We are unique, and I believe we ought to not be trying to be fitting into the cookie cutter southern Maine tourism role.
    All the states have one advertisement they will mail you, if you ask them for it, advertising their state, and why you should be visiting and spending your disposable income with them: again and again please! “Maine Invites You” is our publication. It is a very nice piece. It doesn’t necessarily have much in it related to The County. Driven by advertising dollars, you can understand the heavy weight and emphasis is given to those folks much south of us.
    The CCC&I sends between 1,000 and 1,800 “tourism” packages on an annual basis. When I went to work at the Chamber, I did not know we did this, nor did I think there were folks out there wanting them. So it was a happy coincidence that for me, information packages seem like another form of shopping therapy, and I am a hootch. We do not include Maine Invites You in all of our packages, but we do in about half of everything we mail out. What we try to concentrate on is a great deal of “Aroostook” materials. We hootch newsletters, and anything else the Maine Potato Board will give us. We include member brochures, business cards, and things from the North Maine Woods group, the Allagash, items related to snowmobiling, skiing, ATVing, and various other items as we get our hands on them. NMDC puts out a very nice Aroostook publication, which we include as well. We make an effort to have, include and display all our neighbors’ maps, events and things, along with our own. We stockpile old County Crossroads, and Northern Maine Fair booklets, along with every other “past year” event flyers we can.
    If you think you’re a tourist, I know you’re going to need to find The Mall, and I know you might like to do the Can Am dog thing in the early winter if you’re going to be traveling here for snow. If you have an older publication, and you’re planning ahead, I know you’ll want to call that local group to get the new one when it comes out! We hope you’re going to need to see potato fields, and visit the Potato Blossom Festival, so we keep all those kinds of things, and postcards too, to send you!
    To the State, it seems to me we’re looking to them to fix our “invisibility” blanket (again, I don’t agree we’re invisible). We must be our own solutions. Who is going to market us, if we don’t make the effort to do it ourselves?
    I have just a few things I think of as “nontraditional” for us which includes: geo-caching, Web cams, tweets, blogs, Facebook, and texts on folks’ peton-hoober-dos (a highly technical term). Surely there are many things we can do collectively, to market ourselves other than the glossy Maine Invites You full-page ads we may not be able to afford on an annual basis?
    Two examples: our very own Caribou native, Tess Collins sends me regular notices about upcoming places she’ll be playing. I am assuming I’m getting them the boring way on my e-mail, but I’m sure they’re being sent to all kinds of young people, in the way our young people communicate. I know we all have some young folks who can help us bridge that gap, and communicate the way they are.
    The other example is one the ladies have done in the office: City Wide Yard Sale is now listed on all kinds of funky yard sale sites (and evidently has been a few years) as we try to reach more yard sale folks, who haven’t heard of us. Maybe we buy a catchy teeny tiny ad in Maine Invites You, inviting folks to visit our Facebook, Web site, Web cam, etc.
    Maybe if it’s upside down, or lengthwise on the edge of someone’s pretty big ad? Regardless, they’re all marketing decisions, and we can be our own solutions! There seems to be a faction of folks who expect our businesses to have business plans, but we fly at them every now and then with heavy pitches for the latest “collaborative effort” in print, which always seems to be a bit more money than last year, when we can’t always tell them the distribution numbers, or the target audience. Why aren’t we collectively looking together to plan what makes the most sense for our individual businesses, communities and events? I do not have all the answers, I mostly have no answers, and I don’t mean to sound as if I do. I just think we seem to forget we don’t need to decide for our businesses, but we should be conduits so they can make decisions for what is best for them. After that, we need to be purveyors of materials to hand those people who do come to visit!
    Finally, I must tell you, unrelated to anything else, and it could be unique to Caribou because our name is an animal: my favorite requests, and we get many of them every year, year after year, are those from children who are doing a class project on caribou. Too funny. Thank you Maine Potato Board for Spuddy postcards and coloring books! What is cooler than a potato pin? Well, at least as cool, is notecards, postcards pictures and things from NorthernMainePhotos.com (thank you Mike Bosse)! I forget: Mr. Goughan’s corn maze! We’ve hootched a stash the last few years of those too, and everyone seems to really like them when they come in the mail! Inexpensive advertising to have available to give away!
    We’re steadily building our “hootch stashes,” and I think the other “marketing folks” like ourselves should be too. I’ll swap you, if you have stuff to distribute, you let us know, and we’ll trade you, and find them good homes! If we interest someone to visit the Dog Sled races, the Potato Blossom festival, or the Acadian World Congress 2014, or the 2010 Junior Olympics, we aren’t losing something personally.
    Perhaps our attitudes about ourselves might be one of our problems. If you’d like further details on the upcoming visit, don’t hesitate to contact us, your local chamber, or NMDC.
    Wendy Landes, MPA, is the executive director of the Caribou Chamber of Commerce & Industry. She can be reached in person at 24 Sweden Street, Suite 101; by telephone at 498-6156 or via e-mail at wlandes@cariboumaine.net.