One of the most exciting times of my life is when I first started writing about swimming. It was most definitely a “right place, right time” moment. I was 24 years old, living in Philadelphia with my then girlfriend, now wife, and like many people, got hooked on the website floswimming.
Eventually I was brave enough to propose to Garrett McCaffrey that I write some blogs for the website, and did so regularly for a couple years. I have to admit, it was completely intoxicating.
I had, for very long, been isolated in a tiny little swimming bubble. I grew up in Massachusetts, swam for some teams you’ve probably never heard of, then went to a little college in Maine. All of a sudden I was interacting and writing about stuff that previously I had enjoyed totally to myself.
The culminating experience of working for Floswimming was attending the 2008 Olympic trials as media alongside Garrett. We did pre-meet shows and post-meet recaps, interviews. i got so into it that I failed to properly communicate with my still girlfriend, now wife, nearly resulting in me losing the love of my life.
Thirteen years later, I’m still writing about swimming, although the topics that I engage in have most definitely changed over time. It’s only natural, as I’ve changed to.
All this to bring me to feel nostalgic about a different era. One before social media, where when you wanted to check in on a favorite site, you just kind of….went there.
Somewhere along the line, it became important to use social media platforms to “promote” what you were doing. Slowly but surely people became less likely to check in on 'their favorite websites and more likely to let an algorithm tell them whether they should check in.
This is important because I’ve never been particularly good at promoting anything on any social media platform. I exist on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, in order of how many people likely know I exist there.
Facebook has been by far the most “successful” platform for me. I have 1400 “followers” on that. On twitter I have a few hundred. On instagram I think I’m primarily followed by my wife and family members.
What sells?
On all of these platforms, I have varying levels of knowledge about what works in terms of promotion. I know I’m doing a few things, and very much not doing others. Here’s a short list of “social media” stuff that I know works that I’m not particularly interested in doing:
Documenting the work I do with teams, coaches, individuals. This is almost three categories, but I lumped them together because they have some commonality. First, when I’m working I give 100% of my focus to the task at hand. If I were to try to make cool videos showing what I’m doing, I would give less than my best to each of these groups. It is also fair to say that in many situations, the best work I do is around discussing hard, personal and emotional topics, not the kind of thing that most people I work with would want shared on social media.
Memes. I like making fun of memes way more than sharing them for real
Making people angry. Now there are probably some of you saying “WAIT A MINUTE” with all the pot-stirring I do in regards to USA Swimming and abusive coaches. Let me tell you a little secret. I hate the part where people, particularly people I have no direct beef with, get angry. I do not write the posts for the anger, which is ironic because anger is the best way to get that kind of stuff shared. I write it for the people who have been hurt, to let them know that someone out there is at least trying to understand what happened.
Let me digress here for a moment, and I promise we’ll get to the breakup part already. A few years ago I had a friend invite me to join “Swim Coaches Idea Exchange Group”, a huge facebook group that is now a massive facebook group, nominally of Swim Coaches. I hesitated, then joined and for the first few months mainly looked at it with disgust.
Then i started sharing stuff. I started small, and only shared stuff that I thought wouldn’t be too controversial. Over time, I started to share some of my more, shall we say, “provocative” stuff. The beginning of the end with that, though I didn’t realize it at the time, were two pieces.
In one, I took a direct shot at the American Swim Coaches Association, in another Mark Schubert, who I’ve returned to a number of times since.
These really set people off. Some people loved them, some people hated them. Many did not care, but a vocal minority was passionate one way or another. The peak moment of this time came when I wrote about Dick Shoulberg, which I’ve been reminded of recently. I shared it to the Swim Coaches exchange by accident, and the results were extremely messy.
I stand by both pieces and wouldn’t change them. But I am thinking about changing the way people can find my writing. To put it shortly, as many people know, facebook can be pretty toxic. It makes a lot of us feel like crap and yet we spend a lot of time there.
I’ve heard Instagram is better. Primarily from my wife, who is right about most things and 100% confident even when she’s not. And yes I know that instagram is owned by facebook. Blah blah blah.
I’m giving it a shot. Slowly but surely, I’m going to try and break up with facebook over the course of a month and see if I can get myself out of the toxic mess and to a better place.