Gripe not with city but with its leaders

Published on Tuesday 7 June 2005 12:08

I REFER to your article on the "Inspiring Capital" fiasco ("Red faces as slogan is hijacked for a less Inspiring view of city", News, May 30).

For Councillor Donald Anderson, the leader of Edinburgh City Council, to be so ferocious in his attack on me is unworthy of even a politician.

All the content that is on both www.inspiringcapital.com and www.edinburghsucks.com sites are rehashes of articles that were already published in Edinburgh newspapers and other media sites. The one difference we have is that we are not responsible to anyone else but ourselves and we put our own spin on the stories.

Mr Anderson wrongly accuses me of having a gripe with the city. On the contrary, I love the city of Edinburgh and that is why I highlight the way the politicians like him are running the city.

Where I have a gripe is with the people who are supposed to be looking after my city.

I have not, as Cllr Anderson states "taken the time to undermine and diminish that hard work". I have in fact taken time to highlight a huge flaw in that work and for that I should be congratulated.

Not once over the last few days did Cllr Anderson or his colleagues contact me, nor did he admit that there was anything at all wrong with spending 800,000 on a 15 month-long project to create a new "brand" for the Capital and failing to register at least one relevant domain.

The sad lack of marketing expertise shows throughout when it is estimated that 80 per cent of people travelling to another country do their research online.

Interbrand, the council’s nominated agency, decided to promote Edinburgh through a site called EdinburghBrand.com. Users of the web are not going to be searching for Edinburgh Brand - they are going to be searching for specific information relating to why they are going to Edinburgh.

Before launching the brand "Inspiring Capital", the domains should have been bought, not only in various forms - ie hyphenated, .com and .co.uk - but also in various languages for countries the city was targeting.

For the record, I could have built the council a 12-language internet site to market the city to its various "consumers" for less - and the sites would have been search-engine optimised for each language that the site was targeting.

That is the first step to branding your city globally, and that advice is free.

The Basa

EdinburghSucks.com

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