Internet's Role in Site Selection

Information is king in economic development and site locators know it.

In the world of business site location, capturing information is a key project objective, and those who achieve that objective must do it effectively or their site selection results suffer.

For decades, communities controlled the information flow. If expanding or relocating companies were interested in making inquiries into a particular community they had to go directly to that community. The Internet is changing that.

The Internet has put the search for accurate information unquestionably into the hands of companies and their site location consultants.

The Internet helps companies gather the right information to both eliminate and include areas until they get down to the final choices. Companies can use a combination of sources to identify potential qualifed communities. Those sources include community and state economic development websites, which describe the local community, and private and government sites that give companies the ability to compare community characteristics in a number of ways. Comparative data are vital to successful analysis.

The increased use of the Internet to access information could make it more likely that companies will not contact potential communities until they are ready for the site visits. On the flipside, communities can now use the Internet to research companies looking for new locations. To me, a new two-way street has been created.

More here. (Note: The article seems to indicate that companies have gained the most leverage in this shift to the Net. My question is: how can communities use the power of the Net to counteract this advantage and improve their own position?)