Note: This column resulted from The Icon's story about Bluffton, South Carolina, posted two days ago. Liz Farrell called the Icon after seeing it on a Google alert. To read our original story, click here.
BY LIZ FARRELL, columnist
Bluffton, South Carolina, Island Packet
Location, location, location.
I don’t know if real estate agents actually use that catchphrase in their daily lives, but I know one local agent who should.
The one who called The Bluffton Icon in Bluffton, Ohio, to advertise a listing to readers ... readers in Bluffton, S.C.
Oopsy, friend. You are 755 miles off course.
According to Fred Steiner, who started the Icon in 2009 — an online-only publication “Where Bluffton gets its news!” — this is not such an unusual event.
In fact, Steiner wrote a column about it Monday, “You know you’re no longer in Bluffton, Ohio, when Bluffton Bobcats appear on your computer screen.”
“It’s a slow week this week,” he said Tuesday. “I mean, really dead.”
In the column, Steiner recounts the many times he’s fielded phone calls from confused map-readers. One was from a woman looking for the arts festival, something both Blufftons apparently host around the same time.
Steiner wrote: “Thinking that the caller might be a soccer mom attending the Bluffton soccer tournament games at Bluffton University, our reply was, ‘Where are you now?’
‘Her answer: ‘Hilton Head.’ ”
“Was it the Bluffton Arts and Seafood Festival?” I asked Steiner on Tuesday, trying to determine if the caller meant that or MayFest.
“I don’t know! What do I know?” he laughed.
Steiner said he gets these calls monthly, and he listens to the finer details of the inquiry until the things that don’t add up suddenly do.
“They’re not talking about Ohio.”
When the callers hear where they’ve dialed, they’re embarrassed, of course — and 20 percent of them deserve to feel that way because, statistically speaking, they are probably from Ohio.
Truly, though, calling the wrong Bluffton can happen to anyone — except the real estate agent. I do not excuse that person.
“I thought about selling the ad anyway,” Steiner said.
“You should have,” I said.
Actually, I will give the agent 10 percent of a pass. With smartphones, we’re not always dialing a number in the traditional sense.
Try it now. Just Google “Bluffton newspaper,” then press that little phone number on the 21st website that comes up. Before you know it, you’ll be giving Fred Steiner news tips about residents illegally feeding dolphins in Bluffton.
Expect his answer to be “Realllllllllly? In which cornfield are you seeing these dolphins?”
Bluffton, Ohio, as it turns out, is very farmy.
“The wheat harvest just came off,” Steiner said Tuesday. “The soy beans and corn are still in the field.”
Gennifer Akroyd, CEO of the Bluffton Chamber of Commerce — not to be confused with the Greater Bluffton Chamber of Commerce, which is not to be confused with the Hilton Head Island-Bluffton Chamber of Commerce — has only been on the job for two months and hasn’t received any phone calls from lost souls in South Carolina yet.
But emphasizing the differences between the two Blufftons is on her projects list.
Well, emphasizing the differences between all Blufftons is her goal. One hundred miles away from Akroyd’s Bluffton is Bluffton, Ind.
“We’re constantly being held against the other Blufftons,” she said. “We started the hashtag #OhBluffton to help set ourselves apart. To say ‘We’re the Ohio Bluffton.’ ”
Not the South Carolina Bluffton.
Not the Indiana Bluffton.
Not the one in Texas, Georgia, Minnesota, Alabama, Arkansas ... what? Why are there so many Blufftons?
A funny story about Bluffton, Ohio: Way, way, way back in the day it used to be called “Shannon.” But the town changed its name when it realized there was another village already named “Shannon” in Ohio.
If only they had Google back in 1831 to broaden their search radius.
Steiner told me about a circus that announced it was coming to his Bluffton. The circus sent someone to post signs in the town’s store windows to get everyone excited.
Steiner saw the signs and where the circus was expected to be held.
“Lodge Hall?” he thought. “There’s no Lodge Hall here.”
That particular circus will forever remember the incident as “The day Blinky the Clown had to go to Kinkos twice because Ohio is not Indiana.”
I’ll just say it. We need one Bluffton.
Let’s round up all the Bluffton mayors, give each a weapon (dibs on Mayor Lisa Sulka getting the bow and arrows and Katniss Everdeen braid) and drop them into the woods of Indiana, Penn., where I assume things are equally as murky.
The last Bluffton mayor standing gets to keep the name for his or her town. The others need to go back to the drawing board ... after electing new mayors.
This sounds fair to me. Just think of all the real estate agents, art festival attendees and sword-swallowers we could help.
Steiner has actually visited our Bluffton before. Akroyd, though, has not been here.
Both, though, were raised in and around their Bluffton and seem to love it.
“We may not have the ocean,” Akroyd said, “but we have a lot going for us. The ‘tide’ still rises in our town.”
The “tide” being the times Riley Creek has flooded.
“We don’t have any sharks in Riley Creek,” she said.
