Our goal this year is to reconnect with our membership via digital communication. In Elizabeth Atkinson’s “message from the board” you will see how we plan to accomplish this.
If we get this right, we can go to our sponsors and ask for advertisements because we will have the statistics to show both our improvements and where we are headed.
Part of my job has me looking at the business side of the RECORDER and how to improve it. Looking at how I’ve managed people and projects before, I always had ways to monitor and adjust my group’s success. No matter what we do, we need to measure our performance. We need to know where we are going and if we are on track. We are going to be trying a new online strategy with the CSEG blog and see how we can improve it. We know some of the things we do we may fail, so bear with us. To be ultimately successful, we’ll need to experience some failure.
Our success needs to be supported by our management. Thus, we will be asking the board to help define strategy for us based on statistics from both the RECORDER and Digital Media Committees (DMC). One of the things Jason Schweigert, DMC chair, and I, Chief Editor of the RECORDER committee, have agreed upon is we need to come together with clear role definition boundaries. The RECORDER will be looking after content and the DMC looking after how we communicate that digital information to the membership and beyond. To do this we need to work as a team and support each other.
Something else I’ve come to realize; we need help! We’ll be turning to our membership for just that. We have a lot of smart, enthusiastic people in our membership and this could be an exciting project – laying the foundation to something that I hope will last for a while.
For someone my age this is difficult because my son is still teaching about memes and, believe it or not, using the TV remote.
We will also be asking for your input (crowdsourcing) and will be looking at our statistics, so we can see where we need to improve as we continue our progress towards a better digital presence.
Most importantly we want to see how we can start communicating better, via digital means, to shorten the time we can post about events within the CSEG. We have the instruments to do this through our blog, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn presence. We need to organize ourselves and see how, as a volunteer organization, we can do this.
It is hard for me with some of this social networking. (Just ask those who follow me on Instagram – I am not a regular contributor.) To take advantage of our tech and social media savvy members, we are hoping to engage some university students.
By looking at some recent statistics we can see the following on how people access the RECORDER:
Desktop 79.19%; Phone 17.23%; and, Tablet: 3.58%.
This shows that most of our readers use computers to access the RECORDER. One of the thoughts is that most access the RECORDER while at work. The mobile demand for the RECORDER is nowhere near as high as it should be, on average 40.1% of the internet users use their mobile devices and 55.9% use their desktops. This implies we need to find ways for our members to access this on their mobile phone or tablet when they are waiting for an airplane, on the C-Train, etc.
We see in the statistics that our membership skews heavily towards Canadians, primarily from Calgary, which is not a surprise, but once the RECORDER goes public, we have a very global reach and with a heavy U.S. user base.
How can we take advantage of this international interest to make the CSEG RECORDER a bigger success? How do we encourage authors to contribute to the RECORDER on various topics and how do we get people to volunteer for the RECORDER, DMC and our new communications group? All of this takes tapping into our member resources and encouraging volunteerism.
Share This Column