RIP? lol. This SSA website (and general communication and marketing strategy) has been fine dust for many years now.

Despite the consistent failure to stay even remotely current on the SSA website, a good deal of great content on the 2017 Club Class Nationals is readily available on (brace yourself) social media:

link: https://www.facebook.com/2017clubclass/
@2017clubclass

This Facebook "page" has been rather fun and entertaining when compared to the regular SSA daily reporting. The key to social media is that it is incredibly easy for users to add content. Not the case with a website.

The Glideport.aero tracking has been OK (despite crashing due to too many users). At least 2-3 pilots are running mobile tracking (2-minute updates on 1-second monitoring intervals). Unfortunately, the rest are using spot which is garbage and makes users want to leave in my opinion. Sadly, many have no tracker at all (FlatEarth, paranoid, etc.). Imagine if everyone at an SSA contest was using a mobile tracker app. The result would be awe-inspiring. With that, a live YouTube broadcast for each day would become highly entertaining and could be done from anywhere in the world. Maybe I will try this today for the fun of it to demonstrate.

There is SO MUCH more that could be done to share the sport of soaring and make it appear fun, inviting and accessible for existing contest pilots AND non-soaring pilots...you know...marketing.

The trend for Facebook event pages started with FAI SGP USA: https://www.facebook.com/FAISailplaneGrandPrixUSA/

This FAI SG USA event also has its own Instagram, Twitter, Flickr and several other social media channels. Before this, all FAI SGP content was slaved to the generic FAI SGP Facebook page. I broke the rules, and it paid off.. The FAI SGP USA page has 1800 followers from all over the world and gets about 100k visitors per month (far, far more during the event).

In Europe (FAI land) there are vastly superior websites and social media practices. www.soaringspot.com Etc., etc. The SSA (of course) stubbornly chooses to recreate its systems for all of this rather than save time and money by joining the FAI community and using all of its great websites and communication.

The SSA website has (obviously) been consistently behind the times and almost entirely ineffective, boring, impressively out of date and irrelevant. I use it for contest stuff because I have no other choice, but I cannot comprehend any use case or value for non-competition pilots. Perhaps I am wrong. Anyone?

The core problem: Giving consideration (to this day and for far too long) to the idea that certain SSA members "don't do social media" or "don't want to do social media." That is the core problem. The SSAs decision making and focus are equivalent to being "digitally Amish."

http://www.lolwot.com/wp-content/upl...h-people-6.jpg

The results of all this neglect and intentional resistance to modern communication options are no surprise. Perhaps the SSA should not have 60-70-year-olds running web strategy and execution. We need to consider recruiting (begging) our 20-30-year-olds to build and maintain our digital presence. The SSA GOB's need to loosen their grip, at least a little (baby steps). And if, after that, individual SSA members continue to refuse to modernize and use social media, oh well. We can leave the current SSA site as is (no content) and nothing will change for them…