Educate the World about Modern Scotland

Listen to my Sales Pitch for this project here! (23 mins)

As I travel across the world I continue to find a lot of ignorance about Scotland and certainly from a modern perspective. I also note that local Scots often complain about how the world thinks of Scotland as shortbread, tartan, clans, history, whisky.

In other words when it comes to business not much is known about Scotland.  Some years ago Scotland the Brand did an international survey which showed how Scotland was well thought of as a place for history and friendly people but when it came to business they found the majority of respondents didn't even think we had a business infrastructure. 

Over some 15 or so years I have been asking various organisations in Scotland to donate articles about modern Scotland and the work that it's businesses are doing but to no avail.

Electric Scotland has always been the largest history site dedicated to the history of Scotland and the Scots at home and abroad.  That is why we will get at least 150,000 unique visitors each month to the site and a lot more in the Winter months and especially in January with Burns season on the go.

Why are we so large when it comes to history? It's simply that we have unlimited content all out of copyright and the willingness to work hard seven days a week to make that history available on the site. In other words there is always something new to read.

We know that pretty well every student of Scottish history will make use of our site for research and many Scottish oriented newsletters, publications and media, including the BBC, make use of our content. Radio programs around the globe have interviewed us on various topics to do with Scotland.

We are thus very proud of the work that we've done to educate people on the history of Scotland and its people at home and abroad. To that end the site is being left to the Scottish Studies Dept. of Simon Fraser University in BC, Canada so that all our content can be preserved for future generations.

Now when it comes to modern Scotland we have little to offer because no-one wants to share information with us and of course any modern information is copyright. I have never understood this lack of co-operation as any publicity is good publicity. And what does it matter where people read about us as long as they do read about us.

On tourism we find that Visit Scotland despite many promises have never yet supplied any articles for the site. The tourist trade only want us to supply links to their web site but never supply any information that our visitors can read.

The Scottish Chamber of Commerce won't even return our phone calls.  Scottish Development International won't supply any information citing privacy concerns. Individual Scottish companies won't supply any information about themselves. So that's Scottish business for you.

So where do we go from here?

Here is a video I produced to the Scottish Government

I suppose you have to consider that I've run online businesses for over 25 years and so pre-date the web.  I've always thought that co-operation was the key to using the web to promote Scotland but that has never happened as all owners of web sites tend to only use their own web sites to promote their companies and simply don't share information with anyone else. We on the other hand are happy to share information.

I know from practical experience just how hard it is to get decent visitor traffic. And even when you do get some traffic how many actually return to the site? There are millions of web sites out there so it is a real challenge to get people to visit your web site and especially if they haven't heard of your company or organisation.

How many times have you done a Google search only to be given hundreds or even millions of links? And how many of those sites might be just what you want but be some 10 pages of links deep? Electric Scotland is the oldest Scottish web site so gained unique benefit from being around from the start. But trying to build a brand new site is a real challenge.

Should a company around the world be interested in doing business with a Scottish company it is remarkably difficult to find them.  Also businesses in Scotland that do business anywhere else in the world seldom make any information available on their Scottish heritage.

When talking to a Vice President of one of our incubator units in the USA she told me getting information from Scottish companies was like pulling teeth. She said we are here to help them and we'd love to give them great PR but they simply won't talk to us.... it must be a "Scottish thing".

Now when it comes to social media we look at Facebook as a prime example yet half their visitors just like to play games.  Most of the logins they report don't tell the real story in that many are to accept a new friend but rarely can you find anything about this new friend and so you login to accept them then just head back out.  So what does that achieve?  And how many of the so called groups get more than a few thousand members?.  And when you look at the postings perhaps a few dozen might be active. And so using social media does little for a company.

I've run analysis on the articles I add to the site and certainly find only a few hundred will read them when they are announced on the site although more will read them over time.  BUT I do get at least 150,000 unique visitors each month.  In my view this is the key... how to get in front of all my visitors.

In actual fact the only way to do that is to get what I call "run of site" advertising.  That means you want to be on every page of my site.  There are very few web sites that are designed to offer this. A media/marketing company in Canada couldn't even find one other web site where they could do that despite taking quite some time in looking.

Look at the header of my site and you'll see a Google banner of some 720 x 90 pixels. That space generates some £2000+ each month in advertising revenue for us.  Look at the left border and you'll find another vertical banner that starts above the fold. It's 160 x 600 pixels.  That also earns us some good money. Both are on all pages of the site, some tens of thousands of web pages in all. That is the space you need to be featured on.  The space is more than enough to tell a wee story even if it wasn't clicked on.

I am suggesting that someone sponsor these spaces. It might be a single company or a group of companies.  The second half of this is that we should use that space to educate people on Scottish business.  In other words the banner graphic would be changed each week to reflect that weeks article. The article could be some 20,000 words of text, have 50 hi-res pictures and even videos. It should be an interesting read that people would enjoy reading and look forward to the next one.

I will retain each of the weekly articles on the site permanently so that they become an historical resource.

However, someone needs to come up with those articles which could profile an individual company or a sector or an interesting story to do with Scottish business.  They might also from time to time carry an article on the Scots Diaspora. This is a way to reach a whole new audience around the world.

It's very much like the old days where Scots business people went out into the world and co-operated with each other to help defray costs and to co-promote their businesses. Today we rely on grants to do this. 

Being an educational site we want to inform and educate and as the Scottish business sector is so under promoted and understood it's really time someone out there did something to change this. We can't rely on the current business organisations as they are steeped in ignorance and lack of vision. There are too many people around that were successful in one business but really not good at looking at the larger picture for Scotland as a whole.

What we really need are good entrepreneurs from each industrial and commercial sector that can write about that sector in depth and educate us about the sector and breaking news from it. Also to feature stories of individual companies in these sectors.

I would propose having a special landing page where old copies of the weekly articles are stored. That page can carry specific advertising for sponsors or other companies at no additional cost and might even be a revenue stream to fund the project.

By watching the video at the top of this page I have tried to show how the potential benefits of this project could provide billions in new income for Scotland and hope you'll take the time to view it. The second video is one I did some time ago as an open letter to the Scottish Government. By doing that I hoped to open up minds to the possibilities of reaching far more people to put our a positive message about Scotland.

At the end of the day we need to find a way to tell the world about Scotland in a modern context and this is a way to do it. So the question is can anyone out there help get this project off the ground?