By: Robert J. Terry

San Diego is known for its weather, its zoo and its fish tacos. The California city also wants to be known for cybersecurity.

And, as reported recently by CNET News, (hat tip: the @g1440 Twitter feed) a two-year-old San Diego Chamber of Commerce push to make the city synonymous with being safe online has morphed into a new awareness campaign pegged to National Cyber Security Awareness Month.

There could be some marketing lessons in here for Baltimore and Maryland officials, who see the Old Line State as ideally positioned to become a national cybersecurity hub. After all, the National Security Agency is based in Fort Meade. And on Tuesday the University of Maryland launched the Maryland Cybersecurity Center at its flagship College Park campus to connect the region’s federal and private sector cyber warriors.

San Diego’s efforts trace back to the Securing our eCity program, launched by Eset — a Slovakian antivirus company with U.S. headquarters in the city — and the chamber of commerce. A spinoff of that, the CNET story notes, is the Stop Think Connect campaign. Both are designed to boost awareness of spam, identity theft, phishing attacks and other threats facing consumers, businesses and public agencies with sensitive information networks to protect.

Higher-education institutions in Maryland are ramping up their curricula to prepare students for the 21st-century workplace. The unveiling of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center will not only bring together faculty from the university’s engineering, computer science, business, public policy, social sciences and economics departments to develop new programs and boost research but also try and commercialize those efforts — building and selling a new industry standard-setting firewall, for example.

With state marketing budgets under pressure, a similar high-profile effort here among business groups and private sector partners could give the region a nice branding bounce.