Broadband Internet speeds at Christina Lake are slow, businesses aren’t up with social media or their websites and there is little to no geographic information system (GIS) mapping.
Thanks to Selkirk College, all these issues could be resolved, said Sandy Mark, Christina Lake community co-ordinator.
“Selkirk got funding from the National Research Council to help small businesses adopt digital technologies, kind of get into the century, and we were lucky enough to get a chunk of the time to help us out,” she said.
One of the first issues to analyze is what it would take for the Lake to increase its Internet broadband.
“Our bandwidth out there is very miserable and it’s integral to our economic development plan to increase our bandwidth because we feel that lifestyle workers would be making the choice to live in Christina Lake if we could provide them with what they need, which is bandwidth, reliable bandwidth,” said Mark.
Carlos Rodriguez, the college-industry liaison officer for Selkirk, said the Lake already has the high-speed fibre optic cable at the elementary school but it’s not turned on.
“It’s more a question for strategy of accessing that high-speed bandwidth,” he said.
The second piece of the puzzle that Selkirk will be looking to solve is social media for businesses.
“Today social media is actually a marketing tool and I think everybody can use help in the marketing area,” said Rodriguez. Christina Lake, (its) business right now is really focused on the summer months and through website management (it) could be offering some other services in the beautiful location in a more year-round kind of approach.”
Workshops will be held over the coming months to get businesses up to speed.
“We will be working with as many business that wish to do workshops on things like Facebook and Twitter, social media, and also to get them to really understand how to use Trip Advisor,” said Mark. “We want them to understand the power of (social media) and how to work with it.”
Mark told the Gazette that businesses at the Lake really need to shift away from paper-based marketing and move towards Internet-based marketing.
“Instead of sending out brochures to every place, you get a really strong website, and use your trip advisor and all your tools and then people can find you, so if they look for a nice lake in the mountains (on the Internet) then we pop up,” she said.
Rodriguez said that online marketing has a big impact and raises people’s awareness of a certain location and the facilities that are available.
Mark adds that a lot of businesses do have websites already but they are not up-to-date and they are not harnessing the full power of online marketing.
The third portion of the work with Selkirk will include GIS mapping.
“We can create maps, like the entire trail system for Christina Lake and surrounding area. Out of that information, we put together a digital map and the digital map goes on the Christina Gateway (Community) Development (Association’s) website and anybody that clicks that has an interactive view of all of the trails systems in and around Christina Lake,” said the Selkirk College liaison officer.
But the GIS mapping won’t be limited to the trail network.
Mark said it would include “every category” from food to fishing to hospitality.
“Tourism now is just about all happening through the Internet and we are not ready. We have identified that need and Selkirk said (they could) help us meet that need,” said the community co-ordinator.
She said that the work being done with Selkirk would help the community enormously.