Four days and counting.
With Santa’s arrival set for Dec. 24, Norad (North American Aerospace Defense Command) has once again launched its annual tracking program.
The combined U.S.-Canada organization has been tracking Santa’s journey every Christmas since 1955.
With a dedicated team of staff and thousands of volunteers, Norad uses its high-tech abilities to provide up-to-the-second information about the location of Santa’s sleigh on Christmas Eve. They also answer letters and phone calls from kids across the continent.
The group’s website (noradsanta.org) has games, music, books, and more, and this year the popular site has a local connection.
Michael Iwasaki is a North Vancouver resident and founding partner of newsline360.com, a business that created a digital platform to pull together all the elements of a company’s PR and social media content onto their website. Known as a “newsroom,” the site features easy links to press releases, blogs, photos, videos, and social media channels, without taking the user off the site.
Once a user leaves a website to visit a company’s Facebook page or Twitter feed there’s a slim chance they will return, explains Iwasaki.
Information posted to a “newsroom” can automatically be shared to all of the company’s communications channels at once. “Newsrooms” can also have followers who can be notified of updates instantly. There is also an option to receive alerts that can be filtered for specific key words.
The platform was rolled out in the spring and already had a number of high-profile clients on the roster when Iwasaki decided to give Norad a call in August.
Well aware of the Santa tracking program since he was a kid, Iwasaki thought maybe jolly ol’ Saint Nick could benefit from a digital upgrade. He wasn’t surprised that Norad liked the product, but he was definitely excited.
“Oh my gosh. You have no idea. I’m still overwhelmed,” he says of how it feels to be working with NORAD, which now uses the newsline360.com product for its Santa Tracker program.
Emotion is noticeable in his voice as he reports that his mother, who has passed away, would have been very proud of what he has accomplished.
Always a big supporter of his work, she would have shared his excitement of working with such a big client and being involved in the important task of informing kids about Santa’s arrival.
Iwasaki says Norad’s Santa Tracker website received about 24 million unique visitors on Christmas Eve last year and they are expecting the same this year.
“We are ready for it,” he says.
