First of all, if you want to see a site that really does bring people to the city, see edmontonchina.cn. It’s a Chinese site with over 100,000 incoming links! It’s also a super-active community – I went to one of their events and they had over a thousand people there! Perhaps that would be worth a blog post of my own, eh?

What could they spend $1 million on next year? If the site works as it should, it should be almost self-operating from now on, aside from a little moderation.

As for the 137k for the website, I’m trying to find something in this site that I couldn’t emulate with Drupal given half a day, but I can’t see anything yet… The design would probably take about 3-7 days including revisions.

I too hope that Council is looking at the costs.

I however CAN’T believe that a user-generated content website that has only 242 stories and videos, require an 8 person content team.

If even half of those stories were written by inside writers, you are talking about $5800 per story!

Not to mention that we are not questioning the $730,000 number for 8 writers. All but 1 who should be paid sub $45k IMHO.

Hopefully our council is looking closely at that.

-Jerry

Yes, I’d like to see a breakdown for the “content team” but I also don’t think we’ll do any good for the city to stop funding the project now – it’s been successful at what it wanted to do this year, now let’s see where they’re going with it.

That still means they’ve spent $1.2 million to build a database driven site to display text and videos. Does the implementation, marketing, and “strategy” really cost that much? I think that’s ridiculously high.

Especially if this is a user generated site, the $730,000 spent on a content team is shocking.

A media guy from yvr mentioned a milk campaign that was promoted across western canada to youths, included prizes for video entries and received ONE entry.

The hypercube story provides an example of a bigger, pricier national SM campaign that backfired and did damage to the brand http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Hypercube

There’s more, but my point is that people dramatically underestimate how much marketing/advertising costs nor do they see or realize all the work that goes into research, strategy, etc. All they see is a website and some tweets and figure that’s what cost $1.4 million.

The fact remains however, this is $1.4 million being spent under the guise of marketing our city. If the City announced they were going to spend $1.4 million to make us all feel better about Edmonton, would taxpayers go for it?

Before we can make other people believe in this city, we have to make the people who are already here believe in it. And what good is getting people to come here if as many people are just itching to leave?

I think this is a really interesting program that has a lot of potential, but I agree with Mack that there should be more visible benefits from the $1.4 million already spent for another $1 million to be justified.