‘Discover Hamtramck’ spreads the message of development in the city

Discover Hamtramck has been promoting local businesses and events, and has been hosting events like “Night Bazaar.”

By Alan Madlane
Hamtramck has a very active platform for self-promotion working out of city hall these days.
They are called Discover Hamtramck, and we wanted to know more about what they’re doing, and how they’re going about doing it, so we had a short chat with one of their main people, Alessandro Uribe-Rheinbolt.
Here’s the gist:

The Review: Can you start by giving our readers a short overview of what, exactly, the mission of Discover Hamtramck is meant to be? What part of Hamtramck city government is Discover Hamtramck linked to?
Uribe-Rheinbolt: Discover Hamtramck is a collaborative project between the City of Hamtramck Community and Economic Development Department and the Downtown Development Authority.
In the most basic sense, Discover Hamtramck is a multi-channel platform focused on promoting all things Hamtramck, with a special focus our city’s great businesses and events. Our content caters to both residents and visitors, and we want people to know that Hamtramck is a place with endless amenities, activities, food options, and more.

The Review: Why was it thought essential to create an office like Discover Hamtramck, and what is hoped to be gained by your presence?
Uribe-Rheinbolt: Working with both our DDA and the Community and Economic Development Department for over two years, one of the main complaints I’ve received from local business owners is the lack of promotion of our city and businesses. Other cities and municipalities (especially Detroit) were building out teams, with a specialty on social media, to solely focus on promoting businesses and the city itself.
Discover Hamtramck was the DDA and CED department responding to that sentiment, and, in this process, making sure our businesses feel seen and appreciated by the local government. We want to ensure that the city has the business owners’ backs, and wants them to succeed, and Discover Hamtramck is our commitment to them.
We also noticed that all city promotion (from the city’s official page) was on Facebook, and the content was more related to public notices and updates. Having this channel is great for a city, but not necessarily ideal when you want to both promote businesses in a fun and unique way, and also publish content for City-related logistics and notices.
Facebook also mainly attracts an older population, and Hamtramck is an extremely young city where most younger residents primarily use Instagram, so we decided that our campaign running on both Facebook and Instagram was the best way to attract a wide audience.

The Review: What sort of activities has your office been focusing on since your inception?
Uribe-Rheinbolt: Discover Hamtramck started as a personal project for me, and I quickly brought it into my scope of work in the city in January of this year.
In the last year or two, there has been a rise of “Food Influencers” in the Metro Detroit area, with big growth coming out of Dearborn with content focused on Halal food options.
This style of content is particular in the sense where the creator shows a variety of options that the establishment offers, records themselves sampling the food, and gives honest opinions about the experience and the dishes themselves. I was inspired by this structure and format, and we wanted our own content to align with this as these have high virality, and can grow to attract larger audiences.
I would say around 80 percent of our content is video in the format of an Instagram Reel. We make videos of all types, from very short-form with little information, to full length interview-style videos.
We want our videos to look young and energetic, and, by using viral songs as soundtrack, it allows our content to succeed.
Outside of video content, we have also made a new and updated map of Hamtramck’s businesses, serving as a guide for visitors who want to learn more about where to go in the city. We have designed various print media that we have distributed at various businesses that visitors can also take as souvenirs.

The Review: Do you liaise with other areas of Hamtramck city government?
Uribe-Rheinbolt: Discover Hamtramck runs on its own, collaborating between the CED and DDA. We have gone to Hamtramck High School to talk about the campaign with local high schoolers, and it has grown our local footprint.

The Review: Hamtramck doesn’t have a chamber of commerce, and the DDA is focused specifically on the Jos. Campau business district. How do you fit into that picture, in terms of promoting business here?
Uribe-Rheinbolt: Discover Hamtramck runs as a collaborative endeavor between the DDA and the Community and Economic Development department in an effort to promote businesses in our entire city, versus just in the DDA district. Our goal has been not to limit our efforts, and to make sure businesses across Hamtramck are equally promoted.

The Review: Where do you see the organization in a year, five years, ten years or twenty?
Uribe-Rheinbolt: At the moment, we don’t have full-time staff running this campaign, it’s a project run by me (as one of my many projects) and partially by Summer Youth Interns we hired with grant funding.
Ideally, we would want to have staff solely focus on this in the future, and we’ll have to work internally to figure out a way to make this happen.
To prepare for growth, we are currently working on Content Guidelines and Branding Guidelines documents, for any future staff members who help run this campaign to have the exact instructions and the same vision as what we’ve built already.
We would love to host free in-depth social media courses for local business owners to learn how to grow and scale their promotion online, which we have slowly started to work on.
In a few years, we would love for this to be a major campaign – with TV air time, highway advertising, and more – similar to campaigns by Traverse City and Grand Rapids. We want people from all over to see Hamtramck as a multicultural destination, and make it a routine stop when visiting Downtown Detroit and other destinations in the metropolitan area.

The Review: Any thought of expanding your visibility by, for example, engaging with any local celebrities, chain businesses, or influencers, maybe?
Uribe-Rheinbolt: We had a great opportunity to collaborate with local influencer Chanel Nelson from Vibes Detroit, who has over 120,000 followers and has a regular program on Fox 2 to talk about businesses in Detroit.
She reached out to us and offered a free promotion (usually these partnerships can have a high price). She shared her history with Hamtramck, visiting Joseph Campau as a child to go dress shopping, and she has a special connection with our city.
We made a video for Women’s History Month where we visited a variety of women-owned businesses together. We would love to expand our network and collaborate with more influencers and businesses, but our priorities at the moment have been to build a strong foundation of who we are, and creating a great feed of content to be ready for more future partnerships.

The Review: Please take this space to say a few things that we may not have covered.
Uribe-Rheinbolt: We are launching one of our biggest projects to date, which is: brand new banners and hardware for all 155 light poles on Joseph Campau, from Hamtramck Drive to Carpenter.
These banners follow our Discover Hamtramck brand, which is a bright red color, and we incorporate various shapes and language that fits what we’ve built.
The banners should all be installed by the inauguration of the Hamtramck Labor Day Festival, and it’s an effort of the DDA to create placemaking and physical changes to the downtown district. The banners were funded by the Hamtramck DDA and the Hamtramck Parks Conservancy.

Posted Feb. 7, 2025