From Underwater to Online: Becoming A Social Media Manager

Business Tips

May 28

I was supposed to be an engineer. After all, my dad was an engineer and I was daddy’s girl - so it only seemed natural that I was headed down that path. I enrolled in engineering school and lasted exactly one year. While I did well in my studies, it just wasn't a fit for me. Everything was straight lines and direct paths. I did, however, take this one communications course (nick-named English for Idiots by the student population) to meet the required arts class component and a seed was planted … marketing, communication, and human resources - the study of people - that was what I really wanted to focus on.

When I graduated university (not quite back in the stone ages, but close!), I floundered around for a bit as so many kids do but ultimately landed a role with the Canadian Cancer Society. I was a fresh faced, newly married, 22 year-old girl tasked with volunteer coordination. This was back in the day of door-to-door donation collection and letter writing campaigns to build fund raising awareness. I made thousands of calls to potential donors and volunteers on my rotary phone with the white pages next to me. No such thing as robo-dialers back then!

After a couple of years, the money came calling and I got myself a "career" job in a big corporation. I worked primarily in human resources and marketing for big business and ultimately moved into a consulting gig. I climbed up the ladder and ended up with a big office and a fancy title. I was doing work in strategy, communications, marketing and customer development. The companies I worked with were focused on SEO and UX (User Experience). The internet was a real thing and email was a becoming major communication tool.

The work was great and on a personal basis, my husband and I had money, but no time. We wanted to explore so we made the most of our limited vacation – travelling to exotic destinations for every holiday. On one of these trips, we learned to scuba dive. What a rush! Soon, every holiday was based on diving and we were constantly looking for new countries to explore. One evening after an amazing day of scuba, we were sitting around with our dive guide and he said to us, "you know – you work hard for 50 weeks a year so that you can do this for 2 weeks. I do this all year, and call it work."

Hmmmmm … Interesting …

So, I quit that fancy job and bought a dive shop. No more corporate strategy – it was back to grass roots trying to deal with the age-old problem of finding customers and getting them in the door. I learned to write HTML and developed a website. We got creative with Facebook and figured out how to use email marketing. We used word of mouth and gathered online reviews to build a community of divers not just from our local area but across the country and soon we went from teaching a few people to dive to sharing our passion with hundreds of new divers every year. Instead of travelling and diving for holidays, it was now part of my job as we offered guided trips to exotic diving locations. It was amazing and I wanted more!

So, we expanded the business. I partnered with a friend (the guy who originally taught me to be a dive professional). He had a boat (a big boat!) and we started a liveaboard diving company. Now we were offering trips for divers year-round in the Pacific and we needed a global audience to fill the berths. We expanded our online presence to Facebook, Instagram and video-blogging. We A/B tested messages to figure out what was resonating with our clients. We used capture forms to build up our customer community. We had a chatbot to help us be responsive across all the time zones. Our focus expanded so that we were both B2C and B2B, booking trips with dive shops and corporate groups as well as individual customers.

I was spending 3 to 4 months of the year in the South Pacific diving with clients and guiding trips, travelling globally to meet potential customers at trade shows and balancing it off with time at home, in the office, building the operational side of the business. It was a perfect mix of adventure and business … until ….

March 2020. You all know what happened, so no need to rehash it. Tourism world-wide shut down and our business was stalled. We still had a boat but no way for customers to get to it. We scaled the business back to the absolute bare bones – a few key staff to keep the vessel safe but otherwise … we are in a holding pattern waiting until international travel becomes a realistic possibility again.

At first, I did what most of you probably did … watched the news all day, drank way to much wine and complained to anyone who would listen. But I quickly realized, I wasn't alone. There are millions of businesses world-wide in exactly the same spot. In Canada, tourism has been especially hard hit with almost 300,000 Canadians in this industry becoming unemployed. Women and visible minorities have suffered job loss disproportionately and recovery is just starting. In my local area of Oceanside, British Columbia, (which includes Nanoose Bay, Parksville, Qualicum and Deep Bay) there are hundreds of business owners trying to figure out their next steps as they navigate closures and lock-down and more recently reopening (hurray!). Small business owners who were dependent on personal interaction with their clients (landscapers, hairdressers, financial planners, restaurant owners) are now trying to navigate the digital communication world, many of them for the first time. That's when it hit me … here was a way for me to apply my skills and make a difference right here at home in my local community. From that realization, Elmtree Digital Marketing was born.

Now I share 30 years of communication expertise with small businesses looking to expand their online reach through digital marketing, especially social media. If you need help to develop a marketing strategy, expand your digital footprint or maybe just build a social media calendar and get communicating to your clients using simple and actionable social media posting practices, I can help. My goal is to help small business owners rebuild, rebrand or like me, reimagine their business through social media. I’d love to help you too!

If you would like to learn more about the Elmtree Brand - check out Telling Your Brand Story On Social Media where I show you how to level up your brand game and share some examples of my own brand development process.

POSTSCRIPT

If you are wondering where the name Elmtree came from – it's a nod to my family name, "Almquist" which means "elm twig" in Norwegian. The elm is known for its pliancy and in mythology is often linked to the cycle of life, death and rebirth. In Norse mythology, the first woman is made from an elm.

The name is also a nod to one of my dad's favourite songs, Strong Enough to Bend by Tanya Tucker. In it, Tanya talks about a tree in her backyard that doesn't break no matter how hard the wind blows. It bends and then becomes even stronger – and that is what I am helping my clients do! Have a listen here.