After reading Richard Florida’s book, Who’s Your City and thinking about what he says through his research findings and trying to implement in Roanoke, I would offer some initial responses.

1. It’s obvious Roanoke’s competitive advantage across the 5 life-stages is cost of living as evidenced by our better rankings in Appendix C.

2. The older you get, the better Roanoke is for people. Our lowest ranking was 143 out of 167 for singles ages 20-29, yet it is 50 out of 72 for metros whose population is between 250-500k. Professionals (ages 29-44) it’s 37 out of 72. Therefore, this data confirms our focus should be on attracting and retaining the YP population.

3. Some cities Roanoke aspires to become actually overall rank worse than Roanoke. When you do a head-to-head comparison of Appendix C to cities such as Asheville and Chattanooga (which were cities visited by local economic development officials) Roanoke has better marks 6-4 and 8-2, respectively. Therefore, I think the data shows Roanoke is better than many think when compared to its peers.

4. One Roanoke and New River Valley MSA. Using this same overall head-to-head comparison, Roanoke is 18 of 72 cities in the 250-500k population category. The 17 ahead of Roanoke many have 4-year institutions (Ann Arbor, Boulder, Durham, Fayetteville, Green Bay, Lexington, Lincoln, Provo, Etc.) . Therefore, this proves an old assertion. Roanoke is disadvantaged without a 4-year research entity and the importance of relationships with our local colleges  – supported by the new medical school. Further, the Blacksburg MSA was not in the list. There has been talk previously of working to combine the Roanoke-Blacksburg MSA into one MSA. Not sure what needs to be done to make it happen, but it is worth investigating. One combined MSA would not put the region into a higher population category, but instead would make it a total population of about 450,000 and perhaps in the top 5 of regions 250-500k. Doesn’t that sound a little better.

More to come in the future on Who’s Your City.   

We have blogged about FindYourSpot.com before and this blogger recently went through the process and Roanoke popped up as #6 in her Top 10. I wrote her a comment and welcomed her into the community. No response yet.

The process this blogger is going through is brought to life in Richard Florida’s new book Who’s Your City. It is Richard’s best book so far and really is packed with a ton of great insight and information. I plant to do a multi-part blog series on the book and how that effects our efforts in the RNR. Stay tuned…

We examined the Roanoke Facebook community in a previous post on July 6, and recently looked yesterday about 8 months later and the growth is phenomenal. In July, Roanoke had just under 10,000 registered users and in 8 months the number has soared to 28,344. That is 2,300 a month or 75 new users a day!

This is compared to growth in the Virginia Tech community from 44,000 to 48,504 during the same time.

Many of the top interest categories remained the same during this time. For interest, the top interest of the community is music and the favorite type of music is country with rap a close second. The favorite book is the BIBLE and the favorite TV show is Family Guy.

In July, 2007, 67 people were on Facebook in their 40s now that number is 2,180. (In looking at the comparison to the 50s this number seems low in July, but nonetheless, the growth is substantial.)

For the 50s age group 247 in July and now 1,164.

The 60s was 57 now 118. 

There are 92 people over the age of 70 on the Roanoke Facebook community and kudos to Sgt. Bennington at the age of 80 for having a photo on his profile and having some friends. (There were others older, but the profiles were sketchy.) Also, Kudos to Frank L. Moose Jewelers in downtown Roanoke for having a profile!

The 40 and over age group comprised just under 10% of the Roanoke Facebook community in July now that number is 12.5%. It’s a nice increase and encouraging to see more older Xers and Boomers join social media outlets, even if their motivation is to keep tabs on their children. Also noteworthy, is that the older a person is the less likely they have a photo or image on their profile.

The big aha is – just focusing on Facebook and not MySpace – the Roanoke Facebook community is about 10% of the Roanoke MSAs entire population. This is significant and it shows the emergence of online Roanoke compared to offline Roanoke. Offline Roanoke must connect to the growing online Roanoke so that both groups can better understand and communicate with each other.

Small business owners, marketers, salespeople, civic groups, non-profits, charities, etc. must have a presence to better connect to this growing population. 

An interesting site has emerged to better tell the personal stories of Roanokers to the world. The site is called MyRoanokeStory.com. Each day a new story of a Roanoker is published and it is all user-generated content. Those individuals from afar who are searching for testimonials of the region, then go to this site, read and post your own.

An interesting development seems to be occurring. Now that the problem of attracting and retaining young adults has been identified, and studies have been commissioned, we are now having groups determine the effectiveness of the implementation process. That is what two Harvard graduate students did in Richmond this past weekend. YRichmond is at the center of this implementation plan and are receiving fantastic leadership from its director and a very generous and powerful community leader.  

Until this time, there really had not been a common, shared blueprint for success. Those regions who are gaining some success are now telling the rest of the groups how to do it.

It should be interesting to see how these groups evolve over the next 3-5 years.