Maybe You Don’t Always Need Social Media?
Friday, September 5th, 2008I’m in Kingston, Ontario, Canada right now and it’s a very, very different change of scenery from Singapore. The landmass is (obviously) much bigger than Singapore, but yet the population is only roughly 117,000, compared to Singapore’s 4.5million people.
What does this mean? For one, of course the pace of life here is much slower. Eugene and I had a leisurely dinner on the porch of our house watching people walk or cycle by, and that’s just something you’d never see back home in Singapore.
But it also means, for a small city of 117,000, maybe social media isn’t all that necessary. Besides the hotels, motels and bed and breakfasts, I don’t really see many establishments utilising a website or adding themselves to Google Maps, having a blog etcetc. And maybe they don’t need it.
I didn’t know where the comic shops were, but walking down the main street there were already two. And while I’m hunting frantically for furniture, Google isn’t turning up much, but asking the guy at the comic store yielded four different stores just a block away. Same thing when I was finding out where to buy wine, the taxi driver was more helpful than Google. (Canada has a strange rule that doesn’t allow wine to be sold everywhere, so it’s not as easy as walking into a 7-11 or supermarket back home).
All these suggest to me that no one’s bothering with tagging or maintaining any real presence online. Does it make sense for a university town where a simple orientation can be done in half a day and there is little tourism to speak of? I think it does.
Can an establishment in other tourist-heavy cities like Singapore, New York, Tokyo and the like afford not to bother with a presence online? I don’t think so. And tomorrow I’ll give you a great example why.
Tags: bed and breakfast kingston, canada, kingston ontario, kingston population, Singapore, singapore population
