Putting Houston on the Map

Houston has enjoyed some positive national press lately from a NPR series to a CNNMoney.com photo essay.

I’ve had quite a number of conversations in the last few weeks with community activists, journalists, startups and established entrepreneur-support organizations about the perceptions of  Houston. I think that this topic keeps coming up because many people feel that Houston’s ‘message’ is unclear or that it’s not ‘focused’. Guess what? They are right.

Houston as a city is as hard to define as the lines between our neighborhoods and business districts. We’re 30 counties covering over 600 square miles with a population of 5.8m. I’m a little tired of trying to define our city – cities really when you think of Katy, The Woodlands, Sugar Land, Clear Lake, and Pearland and all points in between – by another city’s standards. We simply are not like other large cities such as New York/Los Angeles/Chicago or High Tech cities like Silicon Valley/Portland/Seattle or other Texas cities like Austin/Dallas/San Antonio or event destination cities like New Orleans/Miami/Las Vegas/San Diego.

Houston is defined by its people, not its places.

Our metrics are accomplishments, our rankings based on reality, not marketing spin or manufactured tag lines (even when they are irreverent and awesome like Houston, It’s Worth It or almost tongue-in-cheek like Houston, A New Energy). The fact is, our message cannot be told with one voice since we are a lot of things to a lot of people. I don’t think that we as the startup technology community need to do any outside recruiting – that’s the job of the Greater Houston Partnership and the City of Houston’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. I believe that we have an internal marketing problem – who needs to hear our message(s) is more important than what we’re trying to say.

The people that need to hear the ‘Houston Means Business’ and ‘No One Retires to Houston’ messages are already here. They are the the ones who were ‘forced’ to come here by work or a spouse and fell in love with the city. They are the ones who were only going to stay a year or two and ended up staying 20+. They are the ones who despite all of our obvious weather issues live and work here because no place else on earth has our mix of major metropolitan amenities and small town friendliness. These are the people (not organizations or groups) that will make a difference in the long run. When you think about how great we are in so many different categories, I’d almost prefer to stay the best kept secret in the country – just not among each other.

Here is a video that Rice University put together for an event that they’re hosting next week that talks about a lot of the things we should all be discussing.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUZocLBx3L0[/youtube]

I propose we make a concerted effort to ‘Talk Up Houston’ with our co-workers, clients, friends and neighbors. Its essentially Support Local, Grow Together with the message(s) about what makes Houston so great, but in your own personal voice. I’m not saying we don’t have significant flaws, but am saying we don’t need to lead with them in every conversation about our city.