For some Squamish residents, improvements to Highway 99 have made commuting to the Lower Mainland quicker and safer, offering endless opportunity and the potential for higher salaries. But for those who want to avoid the time- and gas-consuming commute while still guaranteeing financial security and a desirable lifestyle, Vancouver is just no longer an option.
Jason Cyr understands the dilemma all too well and, during the past year, his dream of working close to home became a reality. Cyr is the CEO and one of three co-founders of Tristorm Product Design, a Squamish-based technology company currently based out of the Galleries building in Garibaldi Highlands. Tristorm aims to become an anchor employer for the knowledge-based industry in Squamish.
"Aside from the fact that I think we have an interesting product, there's also an interesting story that in this little town of Squamish, we can have a high-tech company that can thrive," Cyr said.
With an employee base that's grown from six to 17 since January, what Tristorm is developing is a speedy market research application called Tiipz.com that offers businesses of all sizes a new way to engage with their customers through interactive questions called "micropinions." They generate more activity on social networks and collect data about the customers who are interacting with the business.
A built-in rewards platform encourages continued participation by awarding points which then can be redeemed for products or deals from the business. The latest addition to the platform allows Tiipz to be embedded on Facebook.
"Most businesses rely on research to understand their customers," Cyr said. "They have to go out and do market research, or focus groups, or surveys, or polls, and the big companies can do that because they can afford it but smaller, medium-sized businesses really push back against that because it's expensive, it's time consuming.
"We're taking market research and we're trying to turn it on its head," he said. "We want it to be research without feeling like research."
Right now, Tiipz is free for all early pilot customers, with a full launch planned for Aug. 1.
"As a strategy we are targeting companies that have the big social media numbers," Cyr said. "But we're also, on a small scale, leveraging our little community here in Squamish as a testing bed."
Local companies helping test the Tiipz beta currently include Sea to Sky Adventure Co., Sunsational Vacations, Trinity Romance and The Nest Restaurant. Other notable participants include the West Vancouver School District, the North Vancouver Arts office and The Edmonton Journal.
Squamish business owners keen to further improve their online presence can also subscribe to a leading-edge search site called Weblocal. Whereas Tiipz provides market research and is a way to bolster social media content, Weblocal is a listing that offers subscribers national visibility and access to a system of user recommendations.
"Every business in Canada gets listed on Weblocal because it has to be a relevant directory, but it's just a basic listing," said Gardner MacKay, Manager of Local Search Sales with Glacier Media Group, owners of The Chief, "but when you purchase a membership, you put key words about your business on there and we optimize those for search engines. We give you a video, you can put reviews on there, you can put photos on there.
"A component of the enhanced membership is another piece of software that sweeps the Web and finds out everything that's being said about you, sweeps all the review sites, sweeps all the ratings sites," he said.
Weblocal is backed by Transcontinental Media, one of Canada's largest media companies, and is the second largest online directory from coast to coast. It's only been in existence for 2 1/2 years and receives 2.3 million unique visitors per month.
"We tend to compete currently with Yellow Pages, that's our target competitor," said MacKay. "What Weblocal really does, though, is search engine optimization. We help drive traffic to Weblocal from search engines, primarily Google, because 95 per cent of Canadians use Google."
For more information on Tiipz, Cyr can be contacted at [email protected] or visit www.tipz.com. To subscribe to weblocal, visit www.weblocal.ca.
