Moncton

I recently used Facebook to do a very informal survey. I wanted to get outsider perceptions so I asked of friends and family outside the province, “What do you think of when you think New Brunswick?” The answer was essentially this: “We don’t think of New Brunswick.” Words and phrases like forgotten, vague, don’t know and generic popped up in the answers. More disturbing than this was the fact that many of them had pretty distinct ideas of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. It was interesting to find the Confederation Bridge was quickly associated with P.E.I. but no one seemed aware that the place where it connects to Canada is New Brunswick.

Here’s the irony: since coming to New Brunswick everyone I’ve met has a very distinct idea of what this province is, who they are and what it means to be a New Brunswicker.

I started thinking about this lack of identity outside our own province and started to do some searching. As far as I can tell, New Brunswick is not on Facebook or Twitter. Fredericton is not on either. Moncton appears to be but it is done independent of the city government. (On the other hand, NB Power is on Twitter. So is CBC New Brunswick. And Saint John may have recently joined Twitter.)

How in the world can the province and cities of this province talk about bringing people to the province, particularly young people, and not be using social media tools like Twitter or Facebook or Flickr? That is where the country is; that is where the world is. Where are we? It doesn’t matter whether we like tools such as these. If we need to get our message to people we have to be where they can hear it. You don’t go to northern Saskatchewan to speak to the people of Montreal. You don’t go to a retirement home to speak to young people.

Since coming to this province about 2 ½ years ago, I have spoken to many people in western Canada and most of them have been intrigued about the province. Some have entertained the idea of moving here. Some want to make a trip here, at the very least. Where do I speak to them?

Email. Facebook. Twitter.

I took a walk with friends around Fredericton soon after I arrived here. I took a lot of pictures. I made a video of them and posted it on You Tube. So far, it has been viewed by about 2,000 people. Some have left comments, including someone from Scotland who had visited us and said our city was beautiful. There were some negative comments, which is to be expected, but most were positive and many were from people who had left New Brunswick and felt homesick.

Although it may seem as if I’m arguing for these social media tools, that is not my point. My point is that we seem to talk only amongst ourselves and not the country or the world. Yet it is outside the province where the message has to be communicated. Some of the easiest ways to do this are through social media and, other than time and attention, they cost next to nothing.

Our slogan is, “Be … in this place.” You can’t be in a place if you don’t know what or where it is.

An aside:

Of the top seven Intelligent Communities in the world, two are Canadian. Where are those Canadian cities? Both are in New Brunswick! Why is the provincial government not making noise about this? I see no reference to it on the NB government web site. It’s certainly not on the home page. (Admittedly, the page is so cluttered it could be there and I just didn’t see it.) I can Google it and find stories about this fact, but none are from the New Brunswick government.

Why?

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I’ve been looking everywhere in Fredericton for answers to some questions I have about the “free wireless network,” Fred eZone. Couldn’t get them – anywhere. But I got them right away on Twitter from a tech guy in Moncton.

I couldn’t figure out why so many organizations etc. in Moncton were called Codiac. I searched and searched online, all I got was Codiac RCMP, Codiac Transit and so on. On Twitter, I got the answer right away – from a guy in Toronto.

I also just saw an item from a guy named Jay Rosen (in New York): “You know, the notion that Twitter truncates everything to 140 characters is crap when 17 of those characters are hypertext.” Exactly. (Also why Facebook is more Twitter-like now.) (Note: When he says “hypertext” he’s referring to the fact that tweets often contain links.)

btw … Codiac and Moncton? Codiac more or less means “bend in the river,” which is a reference to the Petitcodiac River, a bend that occurs at Moncton. (I knew you wouldn’t sleep until you learned that.)

(Once last thing … if you look at the Fred eZone page you may get the same sense that I did which is that it hasn’t been updated since about 2005, four years ago. At least, that was the latest date I could see referred to on the pages. On the main page there is a reference to a planned maintenance but, as there is no date, that could have been years ago. I just don’t know and I don’t think anyone else does either.)

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Today I saw two examples of how business, government and other organizations should use Twitter effectively. The tweets themselves may not have relevance to you unless you live in Atlantic Canada, specifically New Brunswick and, for one, the city of Moncton. But the point is what the tweets were and how Twitter was used. The tweets:

From @moncton came: “Moncton’s Codiac bus system has launched a new website! http://www.codiactranspo.ca including real-time bus tracking!”

And:

From @NB_Power came: NB Power employees donate Crocs to help Congo orphans. Check out: http://tinyurl.com/cwfgg6

Both tweets were informational. Both tweets were about something of interest to the people following them. Both tweets were retweeted (passed along so others could see them). Neither tweet involved a pitch and neither was something that was marketing fluff. Both were useful and both did more for, in these cases, the Moncton transportation system and NB Power than all the links to useless press releases and gimmicky marketing ploys in the world.

How do you use Twitter? Inform people and direct them with something they want, not what you want. If you do, odds are you’ll achieve the latter by doing the former.

One last thing, unconnected to the above, I also saw this great tweet:

@ggatin: New use for Twitter. Could some one please bring more paper to the 3rd stall in the mens room on the second floor?

After laughing, I thought, “Again, it’s something useful!”

Note: if the NB Power tweet appears confusing, it is about this (taken from the linked story), “Kind-hearted New Brunswick Electric Power Corporation employees have been helping orphans living in the Democratic Republic of Congo avoid debilitating parasitic infections by donating new and used Crocs, the colorful rubber shoes, to orphanages and poor children located in Africa.”

In other words, it was if interest because of its charitable aspect.

Yet another last thing: Congratulations Moncton and Codiac on implementing a great, forward thinking idea.

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As usual, I’m just asking questions because I really don’t know.  Both Fredericton and Moncton have been named to the top seven list of intelligent communities by the ICF (Intelligent Community Forum).

It sounds great. It’s one of the reasons I moved to Fredericton two years ago. But while this is wonderful for Fredericton and Moncton, what about the rest of New Brunswick? I’m not sure where Saint John might rank but I would guess it’s okay, relatively speaking, given the population size and some of the businesses located there – but I don’t know.

What I wonder about, though, is how things stand once you get out of the three major urban centres. Where are we at in the north? What about the rural areas? And how are we in terms of demographic penetration? Even within these cities, who is using this broadband and how? I ask because I sense a divide between white collar and blue collar (for lack of a better term). I recall reading recently that New Brunswick, having been in the lead years ago, has now fallen to the bottom, or close to, as far as uptake was concerned. Is that true? If so, how did that happen?

I recall something Kurt Vonnegut once wrote. Paraphrasing, it was this: everyone wants to build but no one wants to do maintenance. I think of this because once things like the Fred-eZone wireless network (in Fredericton) was put in place, was it updated? Upgraded? I know I’ve had problems connecting to it. I sent an email a few months ago to what appeared to be the correct address asking questions but it went into the void.

How many people in New Brunswick are on Facebook, Twitter etc., and what about the businesses?

Is there any data available on how many New Brunswickers are using the Internet? Who are they? Where are they? How are they using it? What are they using?

I may be completely wrong. I’m really asking questions out of utter ignorance. But I have a sense there is a divide in New Brunswick, maybe based on age, maybe based on income, maybe based on career, maybe based on location … maybe all of these and more.

Is there a report somewhere that draws a picture of all of New Brunswick and has answers to these questions?

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