Earlier this year I wrote an editorial promising you change. While I highly doubt you spend much time concerning yourself over Citylife’s imminent changes, some of you have commented to me that you have yet to see any.
Let me assure you that while you may not have seen much change, my world has been turned upside down!
For two decades Citylife has been my baby, my precious. Well, I had to learn pretty fast not to be so precious because I now have two new business partners, both of whom I invited in to help me turn our traditional media company into a modern and effective business which is current, relevant, strong and impactful.
Change came hard for many of we old timers at Citylife and the past few months have been all about adapting to it and letting go of past practices and prejudices. The big thing was deciding who we want to be, and where we wanted to go — that took a while as well.
I am happy to say that we have a clear vision now and the future is very bright! So bright we need sun glasses, as one partner rather smugly said to me the other day.
With over 600,000 unique visitors to our site each year, tens of thousands of highly engaged followers on social media, a brand which is well regarded, hundreds if not thousands of business relationships throughout the north of Thailand, a respected voice and platform we believe is known for its quality and integrity, decades of experience under our belt and with the ability to adapt to change, we are setting ourselves up to become THE multimedia house in Chiang Mai to connect businesses to markets, readers to Chiang Mai, and Chiang Mai to the world.
Stage one of our website restructuring is done. CityNow!’s one million images and 7,000 pages (gasp!) have been redesigned and relaunched (SEO fully intact!), with the rest of the site to follow. Our magazine will start leapfrogging every odd month and will be published only on even months until we redesign and relaunch, with Spoon&Fork filling in the odd months. So your next issue of Citylife will be in August.
Our social media is going from strength to strength; we are increasing our content, our communication channels are expanding and this is a direct result of our active participation in Chiang Mai and her myriad of issues as well as our ability to keep our fingers on the city’s pulse.
We believe that we are in the unique position in that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people know of us, follow us, trust us and engage with us. This is invaluable to our clients. It is also invaluable to Chiang Mai, as we aim to use our media powers to work towards making our city a better place. We can support anti-pollution initiatives, we can lend a voice to the UNESCO bid, we can raise awareness about health and social concerns, we can send positive yet honest messages to the millions of potential visitors to our city, we can promote, we can reach and we can communicate.
And we will!
Just bear with us, as change doesn’t happen overnight. But we are committed and we are here to stay. In the meanwhile, go and check out our snazzy new CityNow! THE destination to find out what is happening in Chiang Mai.
And I will keep you posted. As always.
