Connect2Canada: Using social media to create a community of Canadians in the United States

May 21, 2009 • Joseph Thornley • connect2canada, ericportelance

Yesterday, I introduced Connect2Canada as a case study of government making effective use of social media. Today, I’m taking a deeper look at Connect2Canada, what’s going on and the results that are being achieved.

What is it?

Connect2Canada is a network of Canadians and Friends of Canada in the United States. Its goal is to reach out to these people and make them quasi-Ambassadors for Canada.

Conect2Canada was started as a Website on July 1, 2005. The Facebook page was added in late 2008. The Twitter stream, Flickr photos and YouTube videos were added at the time of the inauguration of President Obama (Canada’s Embassy has a primo location in Washington, a great place to take videos and pictures of the inaugural parade.)

What are they achieving?

Connect2Canada’s community is growing constantly in several dimensions:

New members are signing up for email newsletters on the Connect2Canada Website.

Today, members span the United States.

The Connect2Canada Facebook page continues to attract new fan.

Connect2Canada is attracting new followers every week.

Community and Engagement

Making the flow of information two-way is a high priority for Connect2Canada. They respond to Twitter comments and email. But they also work to enable conversations among members, linking to groups around the US and promoting real life events and other networks of Canadians in the U.S.

The Connect2Canada community is highly engaged with C2C. One indicator of this: An email to C2C members from Ambassador Wilson had an open rate in excess of 50%. That’s one out of every two people who received the email opened it. I think that’s a very high rate for a broadcast email.

Resources and Champions

Connect2Canada is run by one full time staffer in the Canadian Embassy in Washington supported by part-time contributions from a few others. They rely on the Canadian Consulates throughout the United States to provide local content.

Connect2Canada had senior level champions. The social media activities were approved and supported by both the Ambassador in Washington and the Assistant Deputy Minister (North America) in Ottawa.

The importance of relevant content

The biggest lesson learned by Connect2Canada? The importance of good content. Says Eric Portelance, the Advocacy Officer at the Canadian Embassy in Washington in charge of who works on Connect2Canada, “You can have the best ideals, but if the content isn’t interesting to your target audience, they won’t come back or they won’t come at all.”

Connect2Canada asks new members to indicate their interests when they register. The people behind Connect2Canada then use this information to tailor content to the interests of members, sending them only the streams of content that match those interests.

Source material

Eric Portelance recorded a video interview with me on May 12 when he spoke at the Advanced Learning Institute‘s Conference on Social Media for Government in Ottawa. I’ve also drawn on his presentation slides as well as my Twitter notes from the conference.

You can watch my video interview with Eric Portelance on YouTube or in the player embedded below.

Moustaches for Kids Week 1 – Make a child's wish come true

November 12, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • MustachesforKids

Mustaches for Kids Week 1

I’m one week into this year’s Mustaches for Kids campaign to raise money for the Make a Wish Foundation. And as you can see from the head shot on this post, the people who live and work with me are having to put up with the dirty lip phase of moustache growing. As my daughter said, “Eeeewwww.”

So, there has to be a reason to subject myself to the laughter that people emit when they look at my stubbly lip. And there is. Helping to make an ill child’s wish come true.

Read about what a wish come true meant to Rachel or what it meant to Jesse, and I’m sure that you too will understand why I am doing this.

So, help me out. Please click on the donate button on the Mustaches for Kids home page to make a child’s wish come true. And remember, I’ll match every dollar up to $1,000 contributed by readers of my blog. So, when you make your contribution, please email me at joseph.thornley [at] gmail [dot] com to let me know that you’ve contributed.

John Wiseman, Dave Fleet, Parker Mason and Francis Wooby all made donations following last week’s post. Thank you John, Dave, Parker and Francis for helping to make a child’s wish come true.

If you’ve read this far in this post and you want to make a terminally ill child’s wish come true, please contribute.

Double your money for a good cause – and watch me grow a 'stash

November 4, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • MustachesforKids

Make a child’s wish come true

Over the next five weeks, you’ll have a chance to see me grow (or attempt to) a radiant, bushy, geeky moustache. Yep, I’m going hirsute.

I’m growing my ‘stash as part of the Ottawa Mustaches for Kids campaign that some of the fine fellows in my community have organized.

Clean shaven - one last time

Between now and December 5, my fellow mustache-growers will go razorless (at least on our upper lips). And as we do this, we’ll raise money from family, friends and even strangers on the street for a most worthshile cause – the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

Make-a-Wish grants wishes to create hope and happiness for children with life-threatening illnesses around the world. It has granted more than 210,000 wishes since it was founded.

Mustaches for Kids was first organized in 1999 in Los Angeles. Since then, it has spread to cities throughout North America. Participants have raised over $150,000 for worthwhile causes like Make-a-Wish through the annual mustache-growing campaign.

Last year, our local Mustaches for Kids campaign granted wishes for Victoria, Jakob and Michael. I don’t think I need to say more. This is worth doing.

Every dollar you contribute will turn into 2 dollars

This year, I will match every contribution that is pledged through me up to $1,000.

If you’d like to pledge a contribution of $25 or more, simply contribute directly on the Mustaches for Kids site and email me at joseph.thornley[a-t]gmail[d.o.t.]com. I’ll match your contribution.

So, please consider making a contribution to help a child’s wish come true. I know you’ll feel good that you did.

Ramius’ Philippe Dame talks about the Sixent social networking platform

August 22, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • community, philippedame, Ramius, Sixent, socialnetwork, socialwebapp

Yesterday, I posted about the very positive experience I’ve had trying out the beta of the new social networking platform, Sixent.

It’s not surprising how good Sixent is right out of the gate if you consider that Ramius has had extensive experience with online collaboration. Its Community Zero product has been in use by corporations and organizations for almost a decade. They’ve clearly applied the insight they gained through Community Zero in building a user friendly, intuitive, functional and fun social network platform.

Philippe Dame, Ramius’ C.O.O., sat down with me recently to talk about Sixent and what he believes makes it stand out.

In creating Sixent, the Ramius’ team’s objective was to “create a social network in which people could share their life the way they want to and connect with people in a meaningful way.” The key to their approach to this is to provide Sixent users with a “lot of control over how they connect with people,” explains Philippe. This translates into “how they disclose their own information and how they disclose content to people.”

“We’ve tried to emulate exactly how people want to present their own personas online. We all operate personal and professional sides. Now with social media and the Web, we’re becoming more familiar with having a public side – be it a Twitter feed or other kinds of services. We want to provide you with adequate ability to segment what you would say and show about yourself, and do so in a really easy to use way.” Philippe suggests that Sixent’s approach to enabling users to show different profiles to different people, “provides a degree of control that is unprecedented.”

“With our heritage in enterprise collaborative software, we are taking it to a corporate market in the fall,” Philippe says. “The idea of categorizing your contacts and having multiple profiles plays well in terms of people’s dual roles of interacting with their colleagues as well as dealing with partners and customers that go outside the firewall. People don’t want to join multiple social networks. So, if they can have a single dashboard and identity, and achieve these things in a controlled way, we think we’ve got a success on our hands.”

“This is an environment in which you are trying to provide a utility to your users so that different kinds of interactions can take place that weren’t previously possible. If they can connect that back to a growing public network, it can provide both great utility for the organization in terms of a deeper reach into the social graph of their own customers and partners. It can also work on the reverse, where users are now able to interact on a personal level in a kind of sister network and be getting more utility from it and therefore coming back on a regular basis, really solving the key adoption issue of getting people to be on your network and to be productive people there.”

First impression of Sixent: A winning social networking platform with a twist

August 21, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • Sixent, socialnetwork, socialwebapp

Community managers, marketers and communicators have a new community building tool.

Ottawa-based Ramius has pulled the wraps off its new social networking platform, Sixent.

I’ve been testing the Beta. And so far, I’m very impressed with this platform. I think it has a potential to be an industry leader.

Right off, I was struck by how easy Sixent is for a new user to master. The first thing that hit me when I signed on for the first time was the outstanding tutorials and demonstrations. There’s a popup help and tutorial box that explains the features of Sixent and guides new users through every task they might want to perform in order to make use of the community.

Once you’re past the basics, everything is intuitive, easy to use and the information you want is where you’d expect it to be.

New users are asked to create three profiles – personal, professional and public. This is easier than it sounds. A neat feature of the set up screen enables you to set up the basic information that you’d like to make available in your public profile and then copy it with one click to your professional and personal profiles. You can then enter the additional information you want to share with people who you will let see each profile. In my case, for example, I share my age with friends who have access to my personal profile, but now with those who can only see my business profile. Sixent makes this incredibly easy to set up and then use. It took me less than 10 minutes to set up all three profiles.

The software also lets users add additional profiles. So I set up a “social media” profile that includes additional information about my geeky side that will only be meaningful to the people who read my blog and share my interest in social media and online community.

Sixent is aimed squarely at the enterprise market. However, the developers at Ramius have designed it to be familiar and intuitive to people already on Facebook and the other mass consumer social networking sites. This design approach will make it very easy for corporations to use it as a platform for social networks inside and outside the organization, as users will be able to immediately begin to use an interface that seems very familiar.

Let’s try it together

The only problem I have so far with Sixent? There isn’t a very big community there. However, that can be fixed pretty easily. All that has to happen is for you and others to join and try it out.

If you want to try out Sixent, I’m “thornley.” Add me as a contact on sixent and let’s explore its usefulness together.

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