I hope you enjoy this month's topics. This is your newsletter, so if you like or don't like something about it, please email us at newsletter@bullmoosemarketing.com and we will adapt. Like everything in politics and everything on the Web, we too at Bull Moose Marketing need to be flexible...

Thanks for reading,
Nick Ellinger
CEO, Bull Moose Marketing, LLC.


In this issue...

Best Practices: A Case Study from Corpus Christi

The city of Corpus Christi, Texas, recently won the Texas City Management Association Web Site Contest for cities of greater than 75,000. Their site gets both the big and little things right and is a strong enough example of e-government that several lessons can be learned from it.
  • Get a memorable URL. The normal URL for this site is a mouthful (er... keyboardful): www.ci.corpus-christi.tx.us. The city realized that few would remember this address and bought www.cctexas.com. While technically a .gov site, many people, especially new Internet users, use primarily commercial sites and thus get used to typing in .com even when they mean .gov. This is why a pornographic site at www.whitehouse.com gets a great deal of traffic from people trying to visit the White House at www.whitehouse.gov.

    You don't have to be avoiding a .gov label to use dual URLs. Bull Moose Marketing has clients that own dual URLs. Young Health Care Leaders, which is a part of the Nashville Health Care Council, realized that www.healthcarecouncil.com/yhcl was cumbersome, so they bought www.yhcl.org as well. American Dental Specialty, Inc., a periodontal group, is in West Allis, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. They wanted locals to know them as www.westallisperio.com and people from farther away to know them as www.milwaukeeperio.com, because fewer would know where West Allis is.

  • Study how people will use your site. Corpus Christi uses its site to market its business and community, to do business through bond applications and supplier information, to inform people about important issues like cold and flu season, bioterrorism, and recycling, and provide links to the mayor's office, emergency response efforts, jobs information, and more.

    Where Corpus Christi goes above and beyond an average e-government site is that all of these links are easily accessible on the front page of the site. If you can't find them there, there is a search function as well. A good deal of effort has been put into making the site easy to use.

  • Create a fast feedback loop. A great deal of making a strong site is collecting feedback from users. Corpus Christi has a survey, again, right on the front page asking about new features that people would like to see. They also have forums for people to speak out about their city government. They also have a monthly newsletter (which we obviously advocate).

    But getting feedback is only half the battle and, as Kevin Costner said in The Untouchables, "Losing is half the battle." Corpus Christi has also set up processes to implement the feedback they get. The Department of Communications and Quality Management provided copies of PageMill to individual departments and trained them on its use. That way, individual departments can set up their pages how they wish and update them regularly (a hallmark of a strong site).

    Corpus Christi is going to process with information from the surveys, adding payment information for traffic tickets and online job applications.

  • Know what you don't know. The initial Corpus Christi site was developed by a department temp named Mike. Jorgensen and Susan (see below for the full citation for a fascinating article about Corpus Christi) tell the rest of the story:


    "Mike, who was looked upon as a whiz kid with the Internet, had developed the department's initial site. He was hired by the city to design a front page, link the other existing departmental sites, select and load software on a server, and then train a full-time permanent staff member. The city quickly found out that when you don't know the technology, it is difficult to supervise and monitor progress."

    "Mike was quite a character. In addition to working for a city department part-time, he had an evening job as a member of a local band. In keeping with his band character, Mike did not look or act like a typical city employee. He had spiked hair and an earring and usually came in late, sometimes with a black eye. One day, during a discussion, his supervisor from CQM found out that his parole officer was "hassling him." When asked the reason for a parole officer, he responded that it was because of the machete he carries. It seemed that Mike also had a penchant for Internet travel, and he managed to crash the city server on numerous occasions with the many viruses he was collecting in his journeys to strange sites. Additionally, it was found that Mike didn't have much respect for copyright laws as he copied city software for personal use. As one manager in the city put it, "I guess the moral of this story is don't be so cheap that you actually create more problems and waste time and money.""


    After Mike, Corpus Christi hired a consulting firm to assist them with the set up with their site, knowing that they didn't have the experience in-house.

    If you need help with your site, request a free consulting report from Bull Moose Marketing.

Sources Used:

The City of Corpus Christi Web site at www.cctexas.com.

Jorgensen, Daniel J and Cable, Susan. "Facing the challenges of e-government: A case study of the city of Corpus Christi, Texas" S.A.M. Advanced Management Journal. Volume 67, Issue 3, pg. 15-21+. Summer 2002.

Do you have any hints for our readers? Any questions, comments, or death threats? Please send them to newsletter@bullmoosemarketing.com.


Bull Moose Profiles: Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN)

In the past two months, not only has the Senate changed hands, but the Republican leadership has as well. Senator Bill Frist, a Senate sophomore from Tennessee, has ascended to the Senate Majority Leader spot, largely due to his efforts on the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which was instrumental in taking the Senate. So how is the new leader on Internet and e-government issues?

One of the best, from our research. In 1999, Sen. Frist introduced the bill that created the Center of Excellence in Electronic Commerce at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (S1912). Other aspects of this same bill aimed to promote the use of the Internet in government agencies. He also sponsored the Information Technology Education and Training Act, which provides $145 million in grants to improve teachers IT skills.

The senator also practices what he advocates. His Senate office is replete with fast computers. Aides say that the senator is an avid user of email (which doesn't sound that unusual, but a majority of senators can't say the same) and that he is very proud of the fact that his Web site was ranked as one of the best congressional sites. This accolade is deserved--Senator Frist's site was an important center for information about anthrax and other toxins during the bioterrorism scare last year and his site could easily be a case study like the above.

In short, it looks like e-government and the technology revolution now have a friend in a high place.


While Bull Moose Marketing and its agents used their best efforts in collecting and preparing the information published herein, Bull Moose Marketing does not assume, and hereby disclaims, any liability for any loss or damage caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions resulted from negligence, accident or other causes.

© 2002 Bull Moose Marketing, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

You may freely distribute Bull Moose Marketing material, as long as it bears the following attribution:
Source: 2002 Bull Moose Marketing; www.bullmoosemarketing.com/politics