Wantsa Boat Cruise

Credit: John Biehler on Flickr

Vancouver is a gorgeous city surrounded by oceans, equipped with mountains and blessed with two months of amazing sunny, warm and beautiful weather. The wonderful city I’ve called home for the past 13 years is also home to some of the most talented people in the tech and social media communities. So what happens when you combine the two of them in launching an uber cool project that aims at creating the largest, most trusted recommendation engine? Well, you get some of the coolest bloggers in Vancouver all together on a boat and show them the plans you got. And that’s exactly what happened last week.

Credit: Rebecca Bollwitt on Flickr

In an outstanding social media event that brought together a number of social media, traditional media and PR folks together on a boat cruise around the Burrard Inlet and a bit of the Georgia Strait. The most interesting part of the evening for me was the discussion around Wantsa’s recommendation engine and the charitable component (i.e. when you recommend something on Wantsa and somebody picks your recommendation, a donation is made to the charity of your choice). I think the embeddedness of the Wantsa engine within our social networks and the charitable components are the most interesting for me. I told my friend Colleen Coplick (the main force behind the social media outreach and marketing strategy for Wantsa) that the event in and of itself had been superbly executed, but the relevancy of Wantsa as a recommendation engine with an aim to offer an option to use social media to effect social change (even without you as a recommender purposefully attempting to do that) was actually quite an interesting and intriguing concept. The launch is still relatively soft but I look forward to testing the platform. Kudos to the Wantsa team, exciting times ahead!

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