with or without you

I first arrived in the Yukon two years ago this August. Besides the lack of a fall season and actually how dry it was in this climate, the biggest shock came when I first realized how little the social media world was being tapped into when developing communication and campaign strategies. It’s not that the North was far behind everyone else in technology, that’s far from it. The purchase of Internet connection into Yukon households was just 2% under the national average, so that wasn’t it either. After a few initial client meetings and discussions with other colleagues I realized there seemed to be a lack of faith that social media and other forms of online dialogue were effective methods of reaching Yukoners.

Two years can make a huge difference. Just since I have been here I have seen our online dialogue grow as a territory, and it is not just for the purpose of sharing pictures or promoting a specific product. The Yukon Government has its own Twitter account as do specific departments, and Yukon Energy has been updating Yukoners with info through their blog entries. From toyshops to cake shops and even our very popular Yukon Brewing Company, Facebook pages continue to pop up and increase the dialogue between private businesses and our small Yukon neighborhood. The most impressive aspect is how these small Yukon businesses get it; they are approaching this tactic through continuous engagement with their audience, from giveaways and contests to constant updates on what’s new and innovative within their field.

I remember being stunned when trying to find an apartment and realizing that there was no Craig’s list, Kijiji or any online classifieds that were being used and updated. Since the fall Kijiji in the Yukon has been building momentum and with the launch of Yukono.com the online classifieds has been taken one step forward by initiating dialogue between fellow consumers and business owners. Here is a recent blog entry explaining Yukono from their creators at Subvert here in Whitehorse.

A lot can happen in two years. Our online community in the North is growing and expanding constantly. Whether you run your own business, manage an organization or are a part of the Yukon Government you have to remember that the Yukon is online and busy discussing your brand, with or without you.

All American, All in Your Hands

bad publicity is still…

American apparel T-shirts are comfortable, right? So comfortable it's like being naked and moments away from having sex.

At least, that's how I understand their current marketing strategy.

I went to their website to research available t-shirt colours last night and was made rather uncomfortable by mildly pornographic slideshows of (likely) underage women. What's more disconcerting is that I was moved enough to write about it now, which means that as a marketing technique, their strategy is working. I'm talking–or writing–about it. So now I'm feeling sick about my own actions.

The solution? Stop talking to your peers about inhumane, or sexist, or exploitative advertising. Instead, write to their complaints department. It's far more effective than ranting on a blog. Why? Because you're about to go to American Apparel's website and increase their hits per day.

I didn't even need to link you there, but I did. Ugh, I hate myself sometimes.

a non-narrative challenge

…So… non-narrative would describe something that does not involve a story. Seems quite easy at first.

But the non-narrative falls at the far opposite of the expected, and can make your brain spin indefinitely, looking for a meaning, a path to follow, a direction to take.

An exercise for you: expose yourself to dérapage (here's a 17 sec teaser), a non narrative audio-visual exploration/movie contest, put up by UQÀM’s students since 2000. This year’s winning movies are now up at www.derapage.ca.

Try turning your thinking off and simply feel the undecipherable images and sounds. It’s a great way to reset your brain every year, to be ready to start a new story, especially if you are like myself and feel much better in the comfort of a story. Cause I personally can’t get away from looking for a beginning and an end…

Participating a while back as a student, I found Dérapage was a great way to fill up with raw emotions, colours, sensations, images & sounds and remember their intrinsic value.

Something to chew on

I am an avid blog follower. I won’t lie, I probably follow more blogs than I should to be a productive, contributing member of society. I think it’s the overall feeling of connectedness I get when I catch up on my daily dose of RSS feed snippets of other people's take and opinions on a wide variety of topics. One thing that I have noticed though is that in my own behavior there is no loyalty to any certain blogger. Sure I stick around for a while and follow a certain feed for a month, sometimes two or three, but in every single case I hit a wall. I find that certain feed has just stopped fulfilling whatever desire I had that initially started my blind, faith-like following of that person or company's views.

Then one day I stumbled across Seth Godin’s blog entry on the Levy flight. The Levy flight attempts to explain and graph the pattern animals take when foraging the forest for food. The results show that once abundant food sources run out, the animal moves off in a random direction and starts foraging again in a new location. Mr. Godin suggests that we take this into consideration when managing and developing our own sites, the thought being that when people are surfing they will come back to your site until they feel there is nothing left that is useful to them. Then they will move on.

So the questions we should ask ourselves are these: how much value is in our site? and how long can it sustain our target audience before they reach their fill and move on? One way we try to achieve this is with through company blogs. However, how effective are these blogs and are they reaching our desired target? Is our blog generating the type of discussion and interaction we desire from it? How can we make sure our audience will always have something to “chew” on when they return to our site?

In fact, these are just the types of questions we are beginning to ask ourselves...