thisismyurl.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/downtown_fredericton.jpg" rel="lightbox[roadtrip]">Fredericton New Brunswick is a small city in the heart of a giant forest. It’s one of those cities that you’d miss if you blinked while whipping along the highway, literally and yet it’s a wonderful city with a strong technology focussed community, highly educated white collar workforce and a clean, quality way of life that’s earned out city countless awards and placement on the top ten lists for almost every category of living. 

This is also why it’s so important for our city (much like many small cities) to make effective use of the web yet building websites in Fredericton is a funny thing, most businesses here simply don’t have them and the ones that have taken the time to build a website rarely understand the basics of this incredible medium.

It’s no wonder why local businesses make such poor use of the web when our city boasts about being a technology hub but is run by typical civil servants with little understanding of the web. Like most small cities, local Fredericton businesses simply don’t know that they lack an understanding of the online marketing world because the local government has an even greater lack of understanding of the web.

Frederictons brush with the Web

Mayor Woodside vs. Facebook

Recently the mayor dabbled in the world of social media by putting up a Facebook page, designed to encourage support for his administrations desire to build a Costco gas station on a woodlot, when the resulting polls didn’t measure up to his desired results? He took it down demonstrating not only how little he understood the public’s outrage to his plans but also how little he understood social media and the power for it to swing both for and against him.

CIO Gallant vs. Google

When the Google Street View car was spotted here in the city recently,  the Chief Information Officer for the city (Maurice Gallant) told our local newspapers, “We’re one of the world’s Top 7 intelligent communities [so it's no surprise that they're mapping us]“.

I’m no rocket scientist but  … the reason Google’s mapping us  is because Google’s mapping all of Canada as part of  the national Street View campaign, not because we’re special. The problem isn’t that Gallant said something stupid to a newspaper (he does that all the time), it’s that it makes the entire city look stupid when this type of thing gets reposted to Twitter and discussed for the world to see.

CIO Gallant vs. the W3C

For a man in charge of spreading the gospel of Fredericton, our CIO doesn’t appear to care if the website (fredericton.ca) is all that good. The website doesn’t just miss when run through the W3c’s validator, it fails with 440 errors and 11 warnings … but it makes sense because he’s the genius who once explained that our local tourism website failed to meet basic CSS and accessibility standards because it’s level one compliant!  

Why’s it matter? Because a website that fails the basic W3C test can’t be read properly by the visually impaired or online robots such as Google making it harder and more costly for the city to market itself online, it’s a basic error like this that ensure the city has to spend more on buying ads than building organic marketing.

Chamber of Commerce vs. SEO

A couple years back, I railed against a company who (with the co-operation of our local Chamber of Commerce and Business Development group) built a  local business directory using sleazy SEO tactics. Why did it piss me off? Because the type of service they contracted was SEO laden SPAM trap that results in people finding ad sponsored pages for the company who built the directory rather than local businesses. In the end, the organizations spent too much money to hire a black hat SEO team to damage the online reputation of local businesses instead of Googling for local web designers who could have built something useful.

The problem?

The problem is easy and it’s not really their fault, the web changes too quickly for city halls to keep up with. In fact, I would say that the web moves too quickly for anybody to keep up with unless you’re drowning in the technology every day.

There are two major obstacles to cities succeeding on the web.

First, the web moves too quickly for them.

City halls are filled with people who have little experience outside city halls. They plan based on multi year objectives and schedule based on what conferences time tables allow for but Twitter barely existed a year ago and Facebook was just a fledging toy two years before that, civil servants simple can’t move quickly enough because the culture of running a city isn’t compatible with speed the Internet moves at.

Secondly, the web isn’t about technology.

Most city halls assume the Internet to be about technology but it isn’t. A website has nothing to do with technology it’s about marketing to people via technology yet if my city hall is anything to go by, technology teams manage websites.

It’s no wonder that small towns through the US and Canada are failing to make the most of great technology when even a city in the running for one of the top intelligent communities lacks a basic understanding of social media.

What’s to be done?

What’s important for small businesses to realize is that they can’t depend on their cities to help market them online and that you need to step up to do it yourself. 

Education

The first thing all business owners need to do is to educate themselves and learn more about the web and how it really works, starting with a basic understanding of how a website is built (Document Structure vs. Document Appearance, the power of CSS) and how it’s marketing affects business. Take the time to read great marketing blogs (from outside Fredericton) and you’ll find amazing online articles such as the A – Z Blogging Guide for Beginners, Chris Brogans great 50 tips for using Twitter for business, virtually anything by Ashley at Upstart Blogger and thousands of other great sites.