After much anticipation, the Department of Canadian Heritage has finally launched a slightly re-designed, up-to-date and more “on-strategy” version of its “Culture.ca” website, (I should point out [in the spirit of full disclosure] that PCH/culture.ca was formerly a client of ours).
Culture.ca (as described on the website) is “Canada’s cultural portal, developed in collaboration with partners from the private and public sectors. Culture.ca aims to engage Canadians in cultural life by providing access to quality Canadian cultural content in both official languages.”
Put simply, it features links to the best Canadian cultural websites arranged by specific categories. The website makes use of numerous social media features such an official culture.ca newsfeed, a new podcast section, (where Canadians are free to submit their own podcasts if they want them listed), as well as a section listing recommended Canadian blogs on the topic of culture.
Now the only question is, is it all “sticky” enough for the intended online target audience? Some of you may be asking where’s the ROI here? This can easily be measured by monitoring feed subscribers, blog mentions and podcast subscribers before and after the launch by using basic free tools such as Technorati , Google Analytics and Feedburner. Of course, the numbers are meaningless unless they tie into your organizations overall objectives. In this case, one of the main objectives of culture.ca is to “engage” Canadians in cultural content and to provide a means to easily “find, share and explore” cultural content. I have a strong feeling they will soon see the fruits of their labour…
