I surf the likes!
But how “good” are you at your job? Like, do you care, at all, about your performance or are you there just punching the clock? Have you ever experienced “stratospheric growth” as part of your efforts or are you just another cog?
Well, even if you are a singular employee, one who wins both monthly and yearly performance awards, you do not hold a candle to our World Surf League’s three person social media team that has spiked a “mind-boggling” 7400% increase on Instagram.
What?
Whoa!
And let us go straight to Engage by Hashtag Sports for a peek behind that booming Wall of Positive Noise. A chat with the “Chief Community Officer Tim Greenberg who is “primarily responsible for overseeing numerous innovation projects while also managing content, original programming and strategy for the League’s social and digital channels.” Let us be inspired but also keep one eye out, knowing that when some people do their jobs very well it makes us all look bad.
During your tenure, World Surf League has seen 1,500% social fan growth across all platforms and a mind-boggling 7,400% increase on Instagram. To what do you attribute this audience growth, and more specifically, what’s been your approach to using technology to manage content, interact with your fan community, and expand your brand around the globe?
Firstly, our team is incredible—it’s not one person, it’s a total collaboration. When I came onboard to oversee and manage our social channels in 2013, and still now, the strategy has been fairly simple: great content programmed consistently over time yield results. Anything that we put out on our social channels, anything we distribute through our broadcast, we really want to make sure that we believe in it, and it is something that, regardless of scale and output, we want our fans want to see.
As a small team—we have three people on our social team who oversee and create daily content—we need to be extremely efficient. Leveraging technology to manage our content output is imperative because otherwise we would not be able to achieve the scale that we’ve been able to deliver, which is roughly 12 to 15 pieces per day on Facebook, an additional 5 to 6 on Instagram, and we’re now programming new platforms like TikTok. From a fan interaction perspective, social is also a great place for us to build community, in addition to achieving scale and reach, we’re using social as a tool to drive engagement.
We also strive to bring the beach to our fans no matter where they live. When we’re creating content that might seem mundane or ‘normal’ to us — like waxing a board— we ask ourselves: could this be interesting to somebody who doesn’t necessarily surf or have access to the ocean on a consistent basis? That perspective is something we try to keep in mind constantly.
Now, a few questions.
First, is Chief Community Officer a real position?
Second, should our World Surf League fire every single person except the social media three?
Third, what is the 1989 World Champion Martin “Pottz” Potter doing on his vacation?
Fourth, do you deserve to become fired from your job?
More as the story develops.
Commented on Disqus? Log out, tap the Disqus button, and your old name and comments come back. The box is ours.
Your comments are still here. Every one of them.
Twelve years of BeachGrit comments came across from Disqus. Connect and we will show you how many are yours. We get your username, nothing else.
Connect Disqus to reveal.
Isn’t it funny to think about all the professions that exist which offer zero contribution to society? Like, imagine how you would explain the jobs to a three year old how and ridiculous and pointless they suddenly sound.
An accountant? Oh, we pay them to count our money.
A barrister? That’s someone you can hire to get into arguments for you.
A secretary? Someone hired to do all the shit you think is below you.
I will guiltily admit that sometimes I did enjoy watching Jersey Shore. I liked watching Sammi, and J Wow. They were both pretty smokin’ hot.
True true true ….but his surfing on that clip is F U C K EN S E N S A T I O N A L.
I’ll sometimes not click off it and re run the down carve at ?Keramas [just after the Harlequin Board short bomb at ‘Chopes] again and again. Pure JJF at Margarets progenitor, for mine.
“…we ask ourselves: could this be interesting to somebody who doesn’t necessarily surf or have access to the ocean on a consistent basis? That perspective is something we try to keep in mind constantly.“
btw Chas! I love how the story never ever develops!
I was just thinking about that. It never develops! But then I was also thinking that in my opinion, Chas, as a writer, has fluidly changed his writing style ever since this Shark Gate stuff, to a more brash and “breaking news” TMZ style writing.
And it’s kind of more entertaining.
Every writer evolves and changes their style/presentation over time, I guess, but I’m not a writer. But I do believe that we are witnessing a historic metamorphosis in the artistic output of Chas Smith, and we should just hold on and and be thankful that we get to witness it.
But I’d still rather read Longtom’s contest write ups.
I watched a guy turn ball bearings into a bowie knife
5 million views.
People be weird
I loved it.
https://youtu.be/yDsVZD6Q5Wc
Oh no, I’m m going down that rabbit hole again. But if I was, the fishhook steel was my favourite.
Firstly, I’m well under qualified and overpaid for the job I do, that I still can’t quite work out what exactly it is
Secondly, enough with Metallica already. Great band, but I think we can all agree that Lars is a dickhead and nobody that actually surfs wears Billabong. It’s the go to brand for people that surfed in the nineties, drifted away from it for 20 years, had a mid life crisis and decided to buy a mid length and get fit again
It’s like something the WSL would have dreamed up.
In honor of Andy fuken Irons.
And folds.
Lars is the fuckin worst.
ESPECIALLY video views!
Just for the sake of argument, even if it was true (unlikely), how would it have benefited the WSL (aside from publicity). If nobody wants to pay for advertising aimed at a bunch surfers, does it matter how many fans you have? Doesn’t seem like the WSL is getting any income from I.G. And without income how can the Wsl or any company exist?
It’s like the WSL is a public company and you have shorted it in a big way.
“So Mr Chief, tell us how you’ve achieved these incredible numbers?”
“Well, it’s really quite simple. When WSL first took over from the ASP, Instagram was barely even a thing. Not many people used it and it was mostly photo’s of Acai bowls or deconstructed coffee. The whole platform has grown exponentially since then so we’d have to be majorly fucking up to NOT have increased out numbers massively. Basically by bending the statistics we can make it seem much more impressive than it is. The timing of this release is critical as the WSL are looking to shed some costs prior to the 2020 season, so we want to make ourselves look indispensable.”
Hahaha. So true.
So this guy started in 2013. It’s now 2020. A 1500% social media footprint increase over that time, seeing as how the WSL didn’t exist before that and the ASP itself had no social media program at all – is that really a massive deal?
How they going next to Gabriel? 3.4million versus 7million?
To me the WSL’s social media thing is pretty good, very coherent, if a bit kooky at times. But it doesn’t seem out of the ordinary for a global sport with those kinds of resources.
Oh wow look, they’re throwing out some insanely high percentage’s associated w/ social media metrics. totally not bullshit.
I’ve got roughly 1000 followers on my account which I’ve had since 2015. If I started with 1, that means I’ve increased my following by 100,000% over 5 years, (or 20,000% per year on average). Makes the WSL number look pretty weak!
There it is folks, ironical sectors of society have reached a point where number of ‘sowsh meds ‘ pills swallowed is considered more important than actual real world acheivements. This has got to an actual point where people take their own lives due to digital pill induced perceived failures. If you wouldn’t smoke a pack a day why would you pop digi pills and wreck ability to concentrate on deep thought tasks or to go about your life. Get off the instacrack/faece book, go surfing or whatever floats your boat and forget that shizen.
Ok boomer
Way out. ‘Millenial’ actually but congratulations on adding value to the conversation.
TIL the WSL Wall of Positive Noise is still way better than the WSL Wall of Business Speak, or close cousin WSL Wall of Technobabble.
That means there is now 7400% more people calling them 540’s thanks to Cote’s daily update
Well said. As someone pointed out, “even real surfers don’t want to watch–we want to Ride”………
People talk to me about surfers on tour or surfy comps in WSL and they get blank stares. All we should care is when is low tide.
And a new devotee from Nike (jock capital of America) is on board with the Wsl now). “We just hired an incredibly talented new CMO, Pri Shumate, who came over from Nike to help build our brand. Our goal under her “leadership’ is to enable our fans to connect with surfers in a much–‘deeper way’.–” Much deeper way? This just gets better (funnier) all the time……..
Typical WSL, more Wall of Positive Noise bullshit.
Tell us the real numbers.
I mean, 1 sad IG follower grows into 200 sad IG followers and bingo 9900% growth !
BFD, weasels.
“anything we distribute through our broadcast, we really want to make sure that we believe in it”
bullshit long enough and eventually you will start to believe yourself
Leading up tp the Olympics Dirks gonna throw everything they can at surfing. From (inflated?) statistics to Wsl ads. to who knows what else. Look for new abuses to follow.
“…we already have over a billion video views so far this year across our social channels” – Wonder what constitutes a view?