06/15/03
Huntsville Times
Last week, Huntsville continued on its recent roll for national recognition. Less than a month after Forbes magazine ranked Huntsville the 11th best city in the country to do business, Employment Review magazine ranked the city No. 4 in its annual list of best places to live and work.
Those two public relations coups followed glowing pieces in Expansion Management magazine in January, Family Digest in March and Southern Living in April.
It appears that the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber of Commerce's PR efforts are finally gaining ground on "the image thing," that causes people from other states to think outhouses and overalls when you say you're from Alabama.
The No. 4 ranking was applauded loudly Thursday night at the chamber's small business awards celebration, and rightly so. Small businesses thrive here for the same reasons Huntsville is beginning to get national attention.
The factors these rankings always cite - low unemployment even during bad economic times, good schools, low cost of living and low cost of doing business - aren't new phenomena here.
Employment Review has ranked Huntsville in its top 10 several times in the past - including No. 3 last year - but other such rankings were more likely to place us at No. 40 instead of No. 4.
So has Huntsville gotten that much better, or have other cities gotten that much worse? I'm not sure that it's either.
I think that Huntsville has done a better job in recent years getting its message out. Chamber CEO Brian Hilson (who's still not satisfied with No. 11, or even No. 4), thinks that good publicity begets good publicity.
"It's a less scientific process than I think we would like to imagine," Hilson said last week.
Getting past the perceptions requires face-to-face interaction, so it's key to get the people who do the rankings or write the stories to come to Huntsville. The chamber and the city have made active efforts to do that, along with providing publications more information on the city and its attributes.
Tomas Kellner, the Forbes writer who profiled Huntsville in the magazine's May 22 issue, was clearly impressed with what he saw and heard here. I doubt he would have gotten such a positive impression had he been working from a press kit and a phone interview.
Kellner insists that he had no personal input into how Huntsville came out in the Forbes rankings - in which we jumped 70 places between this year and last - and that may be true. But the fact that Huntsville was one of only a few select cities profiled in that edition was certainly influenced by Kellner's experience here.
I can tell you from experience that when a reporter is excited about a story, he pushes for better play.
Had Kellner been underwhelmed by what he saw here, it's doubtful Huntsville would have gotten the space it did.
Shelly Haskins can be reached at 532-4424 or e-mail at shaskins@htimes.com.
