After compiling and analyzing the results of the Feb. 27 Twitter Town Hall, the Starkville Convention and Visitors Bureau and Main Street Association have preliminary data from the responses of the participants.
Haley Montgomery, marketing consultant for the Starkville Convention & Visitors Bureau who manages the online and social media for the Greater Starkville Development Partnership, said the original plan was to release the data at the board of aldermen meeting Tuesday. Instead, numbers will be released online through their mediums after Super Bulldog Weekend and try to get a spot on the second board of aldermen meeting in May.
At the meeting, a presentation will focus on the subjects that were most talked about and of interest during the town hall.
She said the town hall received diverse feedback that included more than college students.
“I think the fear or the criticism early on about it was this was just for young people, this would be for students who don’t pay taxes here … well, students pay sales taxes, that’s important to us,” she said. “But the actuality was that there were different types of people who were involved, a number of business owners – retail owners, restaurant owners, things like that. It became a good forum for those people to really hear from what we see as 20,000 constituents.”
The town hall received a large response that exceeded Twitter’s 1,500 tweet transcript limit, so to track all of the #Starkville2012 tweets, a manual pdf of the web site was made.
“If we do a town hall again, we’ll do a transcript each hour, so we’ll have a transcript and that’s easier to deal with,” she said.
Montgomery said she was the person to compile the information, and when the information is released, infographics, bullet points and the complete transcript will be avaliable.
“We’re just recording the information at this point and not basing specific conclusions on them, except these were the most mentioned types of topics and within those topics how did that information break down. From them, I’ve already seen some common threads throughout those topics,” she said.
In the next two weeks, Montgomery said the CVB and Main Street Association will release visual takes on the topics and some specific facts that will be relevant to the discussion. For example, Black Jack Road received many comments, and since then, information has been released on that issue.
She said Starkville cannot improve if discussion does not occur and from the information put out it was clear that people were ready to speak.
“The biggest topic to me was the connection between campus and city. You had people talking about structural connections that physically connections between the university and city,” Montgomery said.
There was an expressed desire to connect businesses to students on both sides, and there were comments on how to create a more unified approach, she said.
She said MSU adds to the culture of what is available and what type of ideas are out there.
“Because we have the university community and we can embrace the university community, it brings us easy access for people outside the state … It creates more of a diversity in our community,” she said. “That’s something we actually try to put out there and embrace because that’s something a little bit different.”
She said in the future, town halls may occur twice a year and will focus on specific ideas in order to help people give more in-depth feedback and follow the conversation. The next step in taking this town’s information is evaluative.
“I think it’s a valuable perspective to see what was mentioned the most just because that helps us see the mindset of where our stakeholders are, but that’s not to say the most mentioned ideas are the most viable ideas,” she said. “We think that the next step is to evaluate some of those things that were shared and see what’s being done.”