Blog Shots: Trying to Reach People

 

This has been a frustrating week, friends.  My wife Sally got laid off twice during the pandemic, both times from various local fitness studios.  It's not their fault.  They've got to control costs the same as any business.  When revenue isn't coming in, they can't keep fitness managers around to manage their total lack of classes.  But it sucked for us.

Eventually, we wound up building a full-on fitness studio out in our garage.  It's really nice, honestly, and Sally has always wanted her own studio.  I even installed WiFi mesh router network to give her connectivity out there, so that she could teach online.  She mostly teaches yoga and yoga trapeze out there, but there's a complete set of weights, a couple of barre stands, a pole stand in case she ever teaches pole dancing, and a high-end pellet stove for when it gets cold.  

Bottom line, we sunk a shitload of time and money into making that place work.

Sally's been busting her ass ever since, working something like 80 hours/week trying to build her business.  I now cook almost every night, clean up the kitchen, schlep the kids all over the place, and basically do my best to keep our household functioning during the week.  I also commute 90 minutes into New York City two to three times/week for the full-time job that keeps the lights on in our house and ensures our financial viability.  Were I not working from home some, I'm honestly not sure how we would have managed.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I've been working my actual ass off of late, and at some point, I'd like for someone notice.  Half the time, I feel like I'm invisible.  These last few months have felt like one of those dysfunctional field problems where you run around endlessly to all the tanks in your platoon, trying to make sure that everyone is doing the right damn things, but as soon as you turn your back, the guys go right back to playing spades.

Because that's just how life is sometimes.  Trying to keep everybody moving in the right directions can be its own full-time job.

It's not that bad, though.  For one thing, my oldest daughter can drive, which helps a Hell of a lot with all the schlepping, and for another, I've still got my various outlets.  I'm in the water two or three times/week, thank God, and I still write -- mostly As For Football stuff.  

I really enjoy working on AFF.  It's a kind of exercise that keeps my brain from rotting, and it gives me a chance to think in a completely different way than I normally do.  It's not domestic, it has nothing to do with swimming, and nobody in my family particularly cares about it.  Mostly, my stuff is just mine, for the better benefit of whoever cares to follow along.

What I think we've learned over the years is that AFF has great content.  When folks give us a chance, they tend to really like our stuff.  In that sense, it's like a lot of the stuff I've written over the years.  People tell me constantly how much they liked my memoir or the first Sneax book.  I've gotten some -- admittedly deserved -- negative feedback on the second Sneax book, but pretty much everybody has liked the first one, and people have been saying absurdly nice things about my memoir.  I mean, I've only got six reviews, but they've all been nice as Hell.

The problem has been getting people to give all my stuff a chance.

It's the same with AFF but to a lesser degree.  AFF has a much bigger audience, owing to the fact that Army Football has a bigger audience.  Our problem, though, has been reaching out to new people. We do fine with the Twitter and Facebook crowd, owing heavily to the support of my classmates and Army's online fan base, but reaching out to actively new fans has not been easy.  Not everyone is on social media -- that's doubly true for West Point grads -- and anyway, it can be tough to break through the various bubbles that social media inevitably generates via its algorithm structure.  In a sense, then, this is the same problem I'm having at home.  I want folks to see how hard we're working.  We're like you; we want to be seen.

So.  Our newest attempts at outreach come via a more focused visual media approach, which — finally — brings me to the point of this very post.  As I said before, we want folks to see how hard we’re working. Working on the theory that most folks don't read, these next pieces represent our attempts to reach out in a different way.

This was intended as a simple promo piece for Instagram, but my friend Terry suggests using it as the cover for the new show, rotating the pics with the topics each week.  I really like that idea.

Similar idea, but this is a two-page brochure for the new show.  No idea how many folks actually read this text -- probably not many -- but hopefully, they've now seen the show's logo a few times.

Haven't put this one out yet.  It's intended to set expectations for our coverage this season.  Again, though, I've no idea how many folks will actually read it.  Nevertheless, we'll probably use it at some point.

This seemed like a good idea at the time, but I don't know if I like it now.  *sigh*

This approach to using pull-quotes from our articles has been a winner.  It helps that a couple of our initial quotes have been super-spicy.  Still, I think these have worked pretty well.

As For Lax was one of the most frustrating projects we did this year.  Because let me tell you, people do not naturally care about college lacrosse.  So we worked with the Lax team's official photographer to get improved visuals, kept our coverage super-easy, presented it in every way possible, and really just tried to lower the bar to entry for new fans as far as we possibly could. 

College lax is not good about this, friends.

Army Men's Lacrosse was ranked in the Top 15 all year and in the Top 10 almost all year.  We finally started getting some traction with these posts as the Black Knights were headed into the Army-Navy Game and the Patriot League Tournament.  They then lost to Navy, got eliminated from the Patriot League Tournament in the first round, and weren't selected for the NCAA Tournament at all.  Ugh.

Anyway.  I judge this approach to our lacrosse coverage to be a success.  It just didn't happen to go anywhere because the team stumbled exactly when the majority of our casual AFF fans started paying attention.  What can you do?

Original photo via @dtamaphotos.

Promo concept for our Spring Football coverage.  No idea how successful this was.  I mean, it can't have hurt, but it also didn't move the needle enough that we actually noticed.

Another promo piece.  This was for our interview with Army AD Mike Buddie.

Concept sketch.  This piece started the visual media experiment.

Haven't used this one yet, and in fact, I'm not even sure that Superlatives are gonna be a thing this year.  We gotta find somebody to write them.  Still, it'll help to have a bit more funny in our Instagram feed.

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That's all, folks.  It's been an interesting experiment, but I'll never feel as comfortable with this visual storytelling as I am just writing out my thoughts in words.  Still, it's been kind of fun.

Let me know what you think.