One of the greatest things about the North East is our strong sense of pride, community spirit and willingness to collaborate to get things done.
It’s also a truly fantastic place to live with a new survey by the Royal Mail ranking Newcastle as the 4th best place to live & work in the UK (behind Edinburgh, London & Bristol) & 1st for cultural activities.
It’s easy to be sceptical of such surveys & rankings but they play an important role in changing people’s perceptions of our region both internally & externally. If we want to retain & attract talent, encourage successful businesses to open another base here & persuade investors to put money into our new & growing businesses, these are the type of positive messages we need to be sharing on a daily basis until the noise gets so loud they can no longer ignore it.
It’s for this reason that our #ThisIsMINE (Made In North East) campaign was created in late 2016 as a way for local businesses & organisations to share positive stories on social media about products, services, events & places that are unique, innovative or special in our region. Anyone in the North East is welcome to join in by including the #ThisIsMINE hashtag at the end of their Tweets & then it will be part of a collective social media campaign for our region which now has a combined reach of almost 2M people! (It’s also a useful way just to see what’s happening in our region so please search for it on Twitter & retweet any messages that you like).
We also have some amazing events happening in Newcastle/Gateshead over the next few months which provide the perfect opportunity for us to come together in celebration of our region & encourage those from elsewhere to see just how much we can offer:
– Newcastle International Film Festival (29 March-1 April)
– Maker Faire UK (28-29 April)
– Newcastle Startup Week (14-18 May)
– Thinking Digital (17 May)
– Great Exhibition of the North (22 June-9 September) (including ‘Business Summit’)
Our time is now.
