The main purpose of our Integrated Action Plan is to find and underline the enormous possibilities that the use of social media and digital technologies are opening in the present of public administration; and, in the specific, Genoa, will explore the role of digital communication for an effective city branding and attractiveness promotion.
Our IAP will be the occasion to recap the work done in this field, before and during Interactive Cities. So, in the first part, we will present the city context and the economic, cultural and general framework which compose the shape of Genoa; we will propone an overview of the themes tackled by the project, with an introduction to the tourism and marketing situation within the Municipality; we will describe the work that we are pursuing since, more or less, five years, and how our methods and strategies have changed, while the general scenario of city marketing and communication was quickly changing.
An important part of the IAP will be focused on the active and participated work that we’ve done and we are still doing with our Interactive Cities ULG. Starting from the introduction of our main stakeholders, we will outline a “list” of experimental actions done, and how we worked, planning and discussing them with the ULG, in its totality or in thematic subgroups; during the project, we also involved as media partner the main local newspaper “Il Secolo XIX”.
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The last and final section will be dedicated to set on focus and future objectives of the project. Interactive Cities after Interactive Cities will have a key role in the elaboration of the IAP, because the things learnt during this way, the people met and the actions experimented will have the possibilities to become a permanent part of the future work that the Municipality will develop in the next years.
Considering that talking about social networks is not simple, because they keep changing and the way the Public Administration use them is not a world explored in deep, we can imagine to plan some areas of actions, but we can’t identify now exactly the kind of tool or of digital channel we will use within two or three years, for their fast and continuous evolution and transformation. Moreover the Municipality of Genoa is in a period of changes, due to the election we had last June which brought a new Mayor. In the next months, we will have to adjust our line of actions according to the new priorities indicated by the Administration.
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Some of our areas of action will be: involving users as marketing instruments; bring into focus a new shared storytelling of the city with the help of citizens, tourists and stakeholders. The Ambassadors: how to duplicate the action and make it permanent; how to widen the Ambassadors network ; how to create an Ambassador network focused on business city attractiveness (e.g. the Mayor Ambassadors Association). Other objectives proposed by the new administration - Focus on City Attractiveness and Internationlization: city marketing actions to attract business and talents
The future development of our Integrated Action Plan will depend mainly on the available budget coming from the City tax (URBACT Good Practice), plus the cooperation of the partners. The promotion activities financed with the tax are planned per year, following the Marketing and Communication Plan designed with a participative method by the Municipality and a network of stakeholders.
In conclusion we can highlight that we already had the consciousness of the important changes we had in the city in the last years, but now, also thanks to the participation to this project, we have the fully awareness that Genoa is changing its face from both points of view: the city itself and the way citizens and tourists see it.
In Genoa we are building a new storytelling using Social Media, a continuous dialogue between public administration, citizens, tourists and stakeholders. The strategic choice to create stakeholder networks, as indicated by the URBACT methodology, is and will be the base of our future work.
Communication Officer
Municipality of Genoa