We finally went over the 3,000 mark for friends on Facebook during the last day of Caribou Cares About Kids. I was very impressed! While there are several other Caribou Maine variations out there on the World Wide Web, and one in particular which has an enormous following, with a very fierce Caribou profile pic (I will leave it to the readers to follow up on, if they aren’t already one of their friends), mostly “our” pages are fairly well populated with a variety of friends, young and old. We started with just the chamber, and then added a Caribou ME, and a Caribou Cares page, which six months after fairly determined fiddling, are beginning to bring in quite a few e-mails, suggestions, and requests from other non-profits, chambers and others.
Did you hear on the national news about a month ago that Facebook went over the half a billion mark for participants? I began to feel pretty discouraged, the fierce looking Caribou, Maine site had so outpaced us with friends, and decided we really needed 3,000 friends. The limit is 5,000 and by last Monday I’d decided we too needed to hit our limit. Soon. If you figure the amount of babies being born, over the last 50-plus years, factor in all the Caribou folks from away, and the rest of those demographics: I think 5,000 is not a particularly aggressive goal.
Free marketing, everyone is out there following everyone, and there’s such a lot of snowballing and swapping! Great ways to get the word out for events, programs and activities. Yes, I am a Facebook Chamber convert. Someday I may never have my own page, I still can’t figure what I’d have to tell anyone else, just about me, myself and I, but I’m thinking it’s a great tool for marketing! Again, I digress. I’d meant to devote this column to tweets, and thank yous for Caribou Cares About Kids.
Since we’re tweeting these days too, we’ve also discovered another avenue to propagate ourselves out there to everyone. And for everyone who’s been out there writing about Caribou, and posting pictures, I want to thank you. We had a fabulous time, despite our feet telling us otherwise, and we so are enjoying all the photos everyone took, and are now sharing out there in World Wide Web land. We have quite a patch of our own, which we really will post very soon.
We all enjoy the tweets, and the pictures, and for the several hundred folks who participated in Xtreme Potato Racing, and then the 2,000 or so folks who were in the downtown during the Tie Dye Extravaganza, we hope you’re hands are pink-palmed again, and your shirts aren’t still bleeding into all the rest of your laundry! We were a bit slow taking the temporary spray paint off the windows, but otherwise than that, we hope you had as much fun as we did!
Thank you especially Mrs. McElwee, Mrs. Chandler, Joe Bouchard, all of our general sponsors, especially the farmers, and most especially, I would like to thank all our current, and former regular chamber staff, who all joined us to help make our Caribou Cares events possible! I appreciate your help tremendously, and no, I won’t ever try to string cable between the buildings in the downtown again. Nor, will I try to make any of you either!
The folks with Tatitudes have promised to come back to Caribou for the Arts and Crafts Fair in October, and said they had a good time! Mostly all our tattoos have faded, and while we are putting together the last newsletter for everyone here, we are ready for the next phase in the life of the chamber.
We will get those pictures on the Web, and make sure you check out that October 1st newsletter, we have pictures too funny to not share, and we just might splurge on a color page! You’ll want to make sure we didn’t take pictures of you in the parade (I thought it might be a nice change), and those will be out there too!
Wendy Landes, MPA, is the executive director of the Caribou Chamber of Commerce & Industry. She can be reached in person at 24 Sweden Street, Suite 101; by telephone at 498-6156 or via e-mail at wlandes@cariboumaine.net.
