Creating public awareness of the downtown parking management project

I’ve done a few things to start getting the word out about this project:

• In early January I set up a @Nfld_Parking Twitter account and added it to the site’s sidebar. I’ve tweeted all blog posts since then
• I also added a widget to the right sidebar of this site that includes the option to subscribe to the blog via email
• I published a Jan. 4th blog post on Locally Grown and updated it with a Jan. 25th comment on the five recent blog posts
• On Jan. 4th, Jane McWilliams posted about the project on Northfield.org (beating me to the punch!) and I updated it on Jan. 25th with a similar comment about the five recent blog posts
• In early January, my request to have our RSS feed added to the Northfield.org aggregator was granted. Our blog post headlines display on the right sidebar of the site in the Gov’t Officials wigdet and on the blogosphere/aggregator page.
• In late January, my request to have our Twitter feed included in the Northfield.org Tweets Around Town feed was granted. The widget on their right sidebar displays the most current tweets from everyone they follow
• On Jan. 25th I attached a comment to the Jan. 15 Northfield News article about the project, citing the 5 most recent blog posts
• Today I used our @nfld_parking Twitter account to follow 70+ other local Twitter accounts that I thought have a connection (direct or indirect) to downtown and therefore this parking project. My hope is that they’ll follow us in return, engage in conversation, and retweet our tweets.
• Today I added an RSS widget to the top of the inner right sidebar of Locally Grown so that the titles of the 5 most recent parking blog posts always display there

This week I’ll contact the City of Northfield to make sure that when the new website launches next week, they’ll have one or more links to this project site in place and use whatever other tools they have to help publicize it.  I also will find out what the City’s plans are for a City of Northfield Facebook page so that I can determine whether we’ll be able to engage with citizens there, too.

In the next week or so we’ll reach out to KYMN Radio and Northfield Patch to explore what they might be interested in doing about this project for their audiences.

If you have feedback on the publicity I’ve done thus far, or have suggestions on what more I could be doing, attach a comment or contact me.