Rural Nova Scotia gets a taste of new media
November 04, 2009 | 1:42 am
So, last week and the week before, I had the opportunity to visit five of Nova Scotia's most beautiful little towns to speak about the web and social media.
We left on Sunday the 18th of October and drove to Baddeck to stay at the Inverary. The drive up was beautiful. In all these years of living in Nova Scotia, I've never been to Cape Breton during the Autumn season. Fall colours were in full effect and my travel mate Steve Lionais and I had a great trip up. It was my Mini Cooper's maiden trip beyond the city limits and I have to say she really loved being able to get opened up on some of Nova Scotia's scenic highways. Have I mentioned what a car geek I am? The best part is that despite our quick pace, she still managed to net 35 MPG. Amazing!
Anyway, we arrived in Baddeck to essentially a closed town and Rob, Peter, Steve and I proceeded to help the Inverary restaurant and bar clear out their remaining liquor inventory for the winter. Steve and I were a bit crusty in the morning for our run along the Bras D'or lakes, but the presentations went well to a crowd of small business, non profit and government listeners. They asked great questions and were genuinely interested in our presentations. Thanks Baddeck!
Following the final live website review, we packed up and headed off to the town of Guysborough, where we were to meet Lorraine, out NS Rural and Economic Development contact who had set up the whole trip. Lorraine is a wonderful Irish lady who had fantastic tales to tell us of her travels in NS and the world. If you ever see her, ask her about the tire iron story. We stayed at the Des Barres Manor, an Inn off the main drag in Guysborough. They have an incredible chef who cooked an insanely great meal for us that night.
Our session the next day was at the local school and we had a great crew in store for us. Lots of great questions, some very interesting sites to review and a nice faculty and staff. The best part of the day was when I went to give my presentation on social media and realized that because we were in a school all the main social media sites were blocked by the school board firewall! The principal summoned a grade 7 nerd who showed me how to bypass the blockage and off we went. I'll seriously never understand why schools do their best to make sure students don't get to learn and grow as social media becomes more important in our day to day lives. Teach them how to use these tools, don't prohibit them. But that's a different blog post for another time.
Once our presentation was over, we had a 3.5 hour drive to Amherst where we stayed at the Wandlyn Inn. Not quite the Des Barres Manor, but clean and at least it had working wifi. This was our smallest crowd, but they were certainly one of our most engaged audiences. Lots of questions, a great group of people and really interested in the social media side of things.
Headed home to my own bed for the night. The next day, I was off to present to the Yarmouth Chamber of Commerce's luncheon session. I gave a very similar session to my talks earlier in the week, but in a compressed timeframe. There were almost 75 people present which made for an interesting dynamic. The Yarmouth Vanguard published a nice piece on it which totally made my day.
This week, we continued the tour in Middleton at the NSCC campus to a good sized crowd that was mostly composed of business owners. They really seemed to appreciate the advice our team had to offer and the sessions went quickly.
I really enjoyed meeting everyone at the sessions. As always, my slides are available at slideshare.net/brightwhite. If you attended my session and have questions or thoughts on how it can be made better, please contact me and thanks again for the opportunity.
Nice related post at contrarian.ca
Parker Donham has a great post over on his blog about the Grade 7 nerd aspect of this. He notes that:
It’s not just schools. I know professional engineers and senior civil servants who can’t get onto social media sites because their IT department knows better than they do what sites they should visit.
So true. So true.
Grade 7 Hacker
Love the part about the principal summoning a grade 7 nerd who showed you how to bypass the blocked sites, we were all probably that grade 7er when we were in junior high. Funny part was that the principal knew he could, lol
it was pretty awesome
Tip for those looking to subvert the school boards:
if you want to hit twitter or facebook, add s to http to make it appear as a secure link.
didn't work for Youtube tho.
High Speed Internet Access
Jeff,
Nice blog post. I am curious about the state of High Speed Internet access in rural NS? What was your sense of accessibility both inside and outside of the main towns?
high speed
Hey Peter,
Interestingly, our talks were sponsored by the high speed rural wifi initiative. I didn't use it while we were there, but there was high speed access everywhere we were in the province.
Tire Irons
It was great to go on tour with you, dude, even if your car made mince meat of mine on the drive back from Amherst!
I'm sure that our audiences got great value from all those sessions, and hopefully, we'll get to go on tour again soon!
poor Albert...
Yes, t'was good fun, indeed. I apologize that a young german/english upstart upset Albert though. :)
Road Tripping
Hey Jeff, great post. I must say I enjoyed my trip with you, Rob, and Peter. Aside from the great talks and audiences the highlight of my visit was the stay at Des Barres. I had never been to Guysborough before and didn't know how stunningly beautiful it was. Throw in a great place to stay and a memorable meal and I'll be coming back.
Unfortunately running in the horizontal rain in Baddeck after a late night sampling the local 'beverages' didn't make top of my list!
I agree completely, Steve
That run in Baddeck was good fun, but the best part was the looks on the good ole boys' faces at the coffee shop that morning.
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