Alphablogs

Hello everyone and welcome to the October 2008 edition of Canada 9-5, a selection of Canadians who use blogging to showcase their work and civic involvement.  This time around is unusual - normally we present a mix of submitted blogs and others we have come across in our travels; this time we’re only presenting those that were submitted through the blog carnival.  We actually get a lot of submissions but many of them fall by the wayside because somehow the message that this is about Canadian bloggers didn’t quite get through.

Here’s what’s on tap today:

Ethnic Marketing

Ethnicomm submitted an article about using Google alerts.  I also liked this post on marketing to ethnic communities.

A recent article on Adage.com called “Marketers: We Don’t Get How to Do Diversity” made me laugh.

Seems that the majority of the big marketing gurus in 60 odd companies surveyed by executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles believed that multicultural marketing was critical to their business but about 24 of them said they can’t quantify it. Come on! What a cop out!

The financial worth of multicultural segments is relatively easy to determine…at least here in Canada. According to Marketing Magazine, South Asians, Chinese, Italians and Portuguese account for more than $36 billion in annual expenditure, or 24 per cent of the total market dollars in the GTA. The South Asian market is worth $12.6 billion annually in Toronto alone.

But it’s not just about not knowing. I think it’s also about not caring. Getting the senior exec to buy-in and support multicultural or ethno-marketing was a significant roadblock for the marketing gurus. And who wants to fight that battle when it’s easier to stick with the status quo?

For the rest, go here, to Ethno-Marketing.

Laid Off After 20 Years

Canajun Finances sent an article that’s a part of a series of posts in the wake of getting laid off at Nortel.

Twenty years of my life summed up in a bank entry (a 5 digit bank entry so I am not really complaining about the sum itself), it just seems so final.

Over my twenty years at Nortel, I have met and worked with some of the most amazing people and seen technological changes that staggered me, when I think about how life was before these technological “miracles”. I have had four children, and many wonderful things have happened, and many sacrifices were made for work, and at the end of it, I have one line in a bank statement to sum it up?

Read more here at Twenty Years In One Line.

Market Your Customer

Our second marketing blog for today is Harmony Thiessen’s Think Tub Business Blog, part of her company, HG Consulting & Publishing.  She seems like a fun person - hopefully I’ll meet her one day, maybe at the bloggers meetup.  She’s qualified - her business strategy career and specialty in marketing and revenues began, she says, at the ripe age of 14, when she was a shift manager at Jack In The Box.  In the post that she’s offering us today she talks about marketing your customers.

Rather that run another TV ad about your great prices, or print ads in the local paper about your anniversary sale - talk about the people who make your business possible = your customers.

Twitter and LinkedIn

Remember the social media megaproject in the winter? I was the Twitter and LinkedIn lady.  Looks like Andrea Stenberg could have done the job, too.  She sent in an article about Twitter.  I also found her entry on a new feature at LinkedIn quite useful - I actually didn’t know about the feature (or maybe I didn’t pay attention when LinkedIn emailed me about it).

LinkedIn announced an amazing new feature on their site: you can now have discussions within.

It seems like a no-brainer to me, but for a long time LinkedIn groups didn’t have this feature. All you could really do with a group you were a member of is look at the profiles of the members and invite them to connect.

To be honest, until now I felt the LinkedIn groups were pretty pointless. LinkedIn is all about connecting with people you know, but you couldn’t get to know other members of a group until after they became a connection. It seemed to defeat the purpose of LinkedIn.

But with this added feature you can have conversations with people in your groups. You can ask questions, comment on what others have to say, have a debate. In other words, you can get to know people.

The full article about LinkedIn is here.

A Toronto Realtor On An Elevator

In September, we had Krupo, an accountant, here at Canada 9-5.  He was so kind to write about an “awesome blog written by a young Toronto realtor ” and offered this article on a new law that will alleviate anxieties around construction completions.  I personally enjoyed this post on elevators:

What I find really amusing is that people go to great lengths to avoid interacting in elevators, and use these time-tested techniques, yet when the doors open, they saunter out really slow as if to say, “Oh, is this my floor?  Right, okay.  I’m not in any hurry to get off, and I did NOT find that elevator ride awkward at all, in fact, I could do that all day.”

A Canadian Tax Blog

Dean Paley sent this article on Minimizing Capital Gains and Estate Planning.  I couldn’t get quite fired up about that topic but found this post here, RRSPs Versus Non-Registered Accounts, useful.  I think many of us just pay blindly into RRSPs, thinking they’re such a wonderful thing.  There are a number of scenarios where they are maybe not the best place for our money.

***

That’s it for this time around.  As always, if you know of a Canadian blog that fits what we’re doing here (and we’re looking particularly for non-IT bloggers; IT blogs are already getting a lot of exposure) please let us know by using this submission form. We’re taking a bit of a break here; the next edition will be out on January 8, 2008.