2009 has great things in store for Agent Wildfire ( he says sheepishly).
One of the first initiatives out of the gate is Generation Go (www.generationgo.ca) - designed to be an online local community hub, daily blog inspiration and event bulletin board for anybody that likes to get off the couch with some frequency.
The plan is to launch in Toronto for January’09 and continue to build national presence by expanding to Vancouver in Sept’09 (before the Olympics) and Montreal and other cities in early ‘10.
What’s the need for this, particularly in an economy that is in the tank?
Here are the five reasons:
1) Rabid participation - 27% pursue active leisure regularly and 13% of us do it more than 100 days of the year, the rest of us are trying to do more - the people that do participate are passionate, curious and super-zealous about their interest - we are creating a community around their existing passions across the 7 channels of activity and hundreds of individual pursuits they find interesting - adventure, fitness, health, outdoors, play, sports and style and unlike other high profile discretionary spends - automotive, travel, dining out - these activities do not go down during recessionary times
2) A Valuable Customer - averagely, the people who do - run, jump, bike, climb, pose, chill out, board, sail, grind, bounce, play - make more money, are more educated, spend more on key product categories, surf online more and are a tough-to-access media target given their on-the-go lifestyle - we become an attractive one-stop solution for them
3) A Multi-Pronged Approach - most ad-supported models for communities like this fail - you cannot easily rely on ad revenues alone to sustain a social ‘net - with Generation Go - the avenues of opportunity are endless - we plan to build the web side of things first but quickly support with offline presence, word of mouth programs with partners and a slate of interesting events that will all provide revenue to the bottom line. Down the road, a loyalty and gift card program, ecommerce site and city expansion become two further appetizing options.
4) The Future is Local - as we’ve seen with the success of sites like Yelp and more locally Blog T.O. - community building, word of mouth and consequently marketing in 2009 has become more about engagement - engagement is tough to build globally (even Facebook is reconciling on that) but locally, its considerably easy to build pockets of influencers and for our clients, brand ambassadors
5) An Attractive Gap - taking Toronto for example - if you want to learn about what’s new in restaurants, you’ll read Toronto Life, or entertainment - Now Magazine, or music - Exclaim - ironically most local media operations don’t have great online presence and for all the ones that do, they do not have a focus on the “active audience” - having talked to a tonne of prospective clients over the last 3 years, this is a need of theirs and consistently the reason why they feel their media dollars are being wasted, Generation Go fills that vacuum up very tidily.
We are planning our blog up for February, a slate of events for March, an offline presence in April and a kickoff event in May.
In the interim, we will be approaching sponsors, media partners and potential contributors.
As well, since we are going to live and die based on grassroots participation, we have set up a Facebook page and Twitter profile to support a seed group of interested advocates and hardcore influencers.
So please get up and GO - join us on these two seed forums if so inclined, see more details and contact us about first dibs on potential sponsorship.
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