Joeyeux jour du Dreapeau National du Canada - Happy birthday to the Maple Leaf - National Flag of Canada Day

February 15 - National Flag of Canada Day

The current Canadian Flag was adopted by Canada on February 15, 1965 after 6 months of debate in Parliament. Today, the red maple leaf is one of the most recognizable symbols in the world and one of the most admired :-)

Ottawa Tourism reaching out to Indo Canadians and Indians abroad

Wilbur Sargunaraj is a YouTube celebrity, singer songwriter, producer from India who lives in Toronto when he's not in Tamil Nadu or touring performing his mix of hip-hop and Bollywood music with a strong touch of comedy. He has a following on YouTube (2.7 million upload views) and Facebook (14,000 fans). He visited Ottawa recently where, with support from Ottawa Tourism, he shot one of his auto-tuned videos, this one called "The Canada Song." He has a penchant for calling his tunes "The (filled in the blank) Song."

A propos our conversations about video and travel at Canada-e-Connect 2011, I think this is a great example of creativity in travel promotion using video. You may or may not like the video. What's important is that the audience for which the video is intended likes it. I am not Indian or Indo-Canadian so I cannot say with any certainty whether this video would make them want to visit Ottawa or not. But kudos to Ottawa Tourism for taking this risk, and most importantly for doing something to target a very specific segment of the travelling public (segmentation). I personally like the tongue-in-cheek nature of it, and I wouldn't be surprised if it goes viral to a certain extent. Apparently it's already doing very well in views. I will be interested in learning what the results in visits from Indians and Indo-Canadians is over the next 12 months.

Watch.

Erica Ehm Canada-e-Connect 2011

Excellent session on "creating a Social Media department" for your organization.

Some takeaways: someone must be responsible, how much you pay that person or persons is very important (Erica Ehm: "the famous intern: don't give the responsibility to an intern who doesn't understand your company"), very challenging to try and address different tourism markets with different languages and cultures, very important that whoever engages in social media communication knows the product/destination very very well and, perhaps most importantly that they know who they are taking to (engagement market) - e.g. Erica Ehm's YummyMummyClub bloggers are Mothers writing for Mothers "only way you can be true."

In tourism, if you in social media in order to attract visitors from Mexico or India or China you should understand what makes travelers in those markets tick. Ideally whoever is communicating should be a resident in the destination (or at least in the country where the destination is) and bi-cultural (not easy to find). I will be speaking about this topic at next March's Online Revealed conference and I very much look forward to the discussion.

Jaime

Le Germain Maple Leaf Square Hotel - luxury and hockey

I was fortunate to be invited to the Grand Opening open house at the new Le Germain Hotel at Maple Leaf Square in Toronto. First impressions: modern elegance.

Full review coming,

Jaime

Canada-e-Connect 2001 (#CeC2011) Toronto Day 1

First day at Canada-e-Connect 2011 was very interesting. Not surprisingly Social Media is still a topic of debate. The issue of measurement comes up again and again at these types of conference. One of my favourite quotes of the day was from @unmarketing's Scott Stratten: "Anytime you ask about the ROI of Twitter, a unicorn dies." The other topic that continues to generate traction is that of branding, protecting your brand, protecting your messages. Personally, I am getting a bit tired of hearing these same questions.

Let's accept once and for all that today's brands (unless they have been firmly ingrained in the minds of consumers, e.g. Coca Cola, Ford - and even then...) are positioned in the minds of consumers by a myriad of voices and up to millions of messages. Your voice as a marketer, destination, ad agency, PR practitioner, etc., is only one of those voices. Branding today is a collaborative effort. Yes, you can try to shape and mold the messages hoping that a critical mass of consumers agree with you and thereby the brand may be more or less what you wish. But make no mistake - you cannot control the branding process 100%. If your product, service, destination sucks, sooner or later consumers will know. So first and foremost, be remarkable.

The best tweet that sums up Day 1 is from William Bakker, @wilhelmus:

"#CeC2011 social media, social media, social media, social media, mobile, social media, social media, video, social media, social media, snow"

Let's see what Day 2 brings at CeC2011

Jaime