He is only weeks old but the royal baby is already ascending the social media throne.
Prince George the city is now far down the search engine ladder, thanks to people all over the world Googling, Tweeting and Facebooking about Prince George the wee heir to the Commonwealth's crown.
Yes, it's a royal pain in the computer chips but the community relations and public service agencies of the area believe the benefits will be worth a king's ransom.
"We're leveraging that right now," said UNBC vice-president of external relations Rob Van Adrichem. "[Our online products] are getting millions of impressions and hundreds of walk-throughs. We got ahead of the event and were able to work with it."
Van Adrichem was one of several PR professionals called to a roundtable at city hall when it became clear the name George was in heavy consideration by the royal parents William and Kate.
"Us, Tourism Prince George, Northern Development Initiative Trust, the airport, there were others as well - we all sat down and worked together on ideas because we all need Prince George to be seen in a positive light," Van Adrichem said.
Tourism Prince George started tracking the search engine traffic, looking for signs of slippage in the city's standing. By the time the little prince was four days old, all three places had been overwhelmed by the future king.
Tourism Prince George (TPG) CEO Aidan Kelly said if you typed "Prince George" into a search engine while sitting in this city, our area's information still came out close to the top.
However, said Kelly, he contacted people in other parts of the world and got them to try the same online search for "Prince George" and "we had fallen off the map. We were on the sixth page of Google searches internationally," he said.
Relentless Media is an internet marketing company used by some Prince George firms to make sure their corporate presence is at the top of searches on engines like Google, Ask, Yahoo, etc. Founder and chief strategist Craig Hauptman said "search results are determined by a number of factors, two of which are localization and personalization. Users will get different search results based on their location, so if there's a closer 'Prince George' it may show up first. Also, if a user is signed into their Google account, they may see results that are influenced by their browsing history."
Kelly said TPG's technology staff was "having a challenging time of it," but said the benefits of the same-name situation were "like winning the lottery in a public awareness sense. No budget could have ever bought us the direct exposure we have gotten in the past few days. That would be totally valuable if that's all there was to it, but with the Canada Winter Games and the World Baseball Challenge and city's 100th anniversary and all the other good things going on in our city, it just adds to an online climate of positivity for Prince George."
Confirming Kelly's assessment, mayor Shari Green said she had a couple of steady days doing international interviews about the city's namesake coincidence, including media in China, England, the United States and all over Canada. Even The Today Show in the U.S. had her on their program. The audience added up to untold millions.
Local software inventor Garth Frizzell said the way the global digital conversation works, it will indeed be harder to hear the city's message with all the internet "voices" talking about the baby, but there are technical triggers in the online world that will also help, because there are just as many new "ears" tuned to the Prince George message. Those ears (people who set their Google alerts for "Prince George" or people who set their smartphones to troll for the "Prince George" keywords) are looking for baby news but the city's news will also pop up in their flow of information.
"It's not a fading opportunity," Frizzell said. "So we have to lace our 'Prince George' keyword messages with other bits of information that might score with that big audience out there. We can, in effect, interject on the royal baby's conversation. Search engine optimization is not about technicalities, it is about psychology."
