IOL Strength and Conditioning

What is social media? How can we use it? Why would we want to?

I know you’ve heard of it—social media, Facebook… Twitter. You may be thinking the same as Dave, which is why would anyone want to do that? That’s what he said when I told him I was sticking my foot in the social door, but that’s also what he said when I started making a three-page website back in the winter of 1998, or started the email discussion group the following summer. He said it again when I installed the forum board software in 2004. He sure was wrong on those occasions, so why not now?

How I see it is the trilogy of our well-established strength training forum, plus the personal and easy-going aspects of Facebook and the wider-reaching, free-wheeling nature of Twitter rounds out everything we could need for learning and growing our web-based education and camaraderie of iron.

We’re sharing information, passing on links, getting a quick grin from a note from a new acquaintance—a friend of a friend, perhaps—enjoying a memory of someone who was in the audience when Dave won the Mr. America onstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1965. You’re not going to get that stuff training at home, and rarely will you get much of it at your neighborhood gym. You’re going to have to cast a little wider for the real gems, and that’s where the new social media comes in.

The forum IronOnline you know of if you’ve been reading past blog posts or are a subscriber of Dave’s weekly newsletter. That’s social media; it’s just not the social media you heard about on CNN.

The CNN stuff, that would be more like Facebook and Twitter; Facebook is a site in which you create your own page, add a profile page with a bio and a small photo avatar, then update with a status from time to time, add photos, video or blog-like posts, and begin collecting friends.

Twitter is all about short bursts of information, perhaps an answer to a person’s posted question or a link to something interesting in your field. Some people post bits of nothing; others post solid information, and what you see depends on what type of people you follow. When someone posts their every trip to the grocery store, I’ll have to unfollow—for me, that’s just too much information. But already I’ve had some truly choice links pass through my filter, stuff I would not have otherwise seen, and I’ve introduced myself to leaders in our industry in a way that simply would not have been possible via email.

Let’s say you’re mildly interested. You’ve gone over to Facebook or Twitter and signed up. What do you do next? One easy way to build up some camaraderie pronto is to go to my Facebook friends or Twitter followers and wheel through the names and avatar photos scanning for your acquaintances from our forum or your other stops around the ‘net. On Facebook, click Add Friend to send a friend request; on Twitter, a simple click on the follow link adds that person’s twitter updates to your message scroll.

You’ll be using me as a hub to your iron connections. By the time you’re finished, maybe you’ll even post one of your golden era memories on the Dave Draper fan page, or will RSVP for our next bash event, a Dan John seminar in Draper, Utah, just south of Salt Lake City, on June 6. If you’re an IroingnOnline forum regular, you’ll have certainly re-connected with a hundred or so familiar faces in about five minutes by clicking through my Facebook friends, and if you add yourself to the IronOnline business list, you’ll get a status note in your Facebook page when new videos or photos are uploaded.

Your new Facebook buddies would love to hear stories from those of you who enjoyed the training golden era in person. What was it like training back before it was cool? Did you travel to any contests, maybe hitchhike with a gym buddy? Give us a choice memory and we’ll reward you with a big IronOnline welcome.

You can further pursue your twittering interests using the follow suggestions over at the fightgeek’s blog: Strength, nutrition and conditioning on twitter.