Episode 845 - Social Media Pros and Cons for Martial Arts

In this episode Jeremy Lesniak and co-host Andrew Adams discuss the pros and cons of social media, in the context of martial arts.

Social Media Pros and Cons for Martial Artists - Episode 845

In this episode, Jeremy and Andrew talk all about social media’s pros and cons, in regards to martial artists.

Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, as well as other social media platforms have been growing in popularity for many years. But with this growth comes ups and downs.

Join in as we discuss our thoughts and after listening to the episode, let us know your thoughts about it. Don’t forget to drop them in the comment section down below!

Show Transcript

Jeremy (00:00.618)

What's happening everybody welcome whistle kick martial arts radio jeremy here with andrew today We're talking about social media pros and cons Specifically as it relates to martial arts martial arts schools martial arts businesses beyond schools martial artists As individuals we're going to talk about all that and probably some more stick around Thanks for being here. If you happen to be new to what we do at whistle cake Well, our mission is to connect educate and entertain

the traditional martial artists of the world, no matter what you do, no matter where you're doing it. We feel just as strongly about supporting the Taekwondo practitioner in Jabuti as we do the karate practitioner in Uruguay as the BJJ practitioner in- Catmandu. I was gonna actually pull like a US. Oh.

in what's a radic in intercourse Pennsylvania USA. Sure. Okay. I went ridiculous. It had to be done. It's a real town by the way.

And I've completely just lost my train of thought. If you wanna know more about the things that we do and why we're so passionate about this, whistlekick.com is the place for you to go. We've got a lot of great stuff that we work on. What we do is more than martial arts radio. We put on a number of events. We put out books. We have social media. We offer consulting services. We are a broad company with quite a few people working on a lot of really cool, different stuff. Whistlekick.com is gonna...

connect you to all of those things. Connect, connect, educate, entertain. We've got a store. We make things like shirts and pants and protective equipment and training programs and lots more so you can find out more about that stuff over there and use the code podcast15 to save 15% on what we're doing there. And my shirt, you know, you might look at my shirt and say, Jeremy, this shirt doesn't sit right. Well, it's because my arms are huge. It's really- It's because you're jacked. It's because I'm jacked. It's really what's happening.

Jeremy (02:13.57)

And if you're listening versus watching while you're missing out on the jackedness of my arms in this shirt I should probably just cut this off They are they're just a little bit too short for my arms. I put on some muscle this summer. It's what can I say? uh Your shirt doesn't fit well in the arms because your arms are jacked my belly must be jacked too. You have a very jacked belly it's um Interesting interesting unrelated to anything else. It has been

expressed to me by people who know things, that physiologically, health-wise, et cetera, we should have a little bit of a belly. I'm just ahead of the curve. You may have a little bit more, but if you look at primates in the wild, right? Like, they're not shredded. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, healthy, our historical definition of healthy carries a little bit of body fat. Yeah, yeah, but we digress. As we always do.

because it's fun, because we're friends, because, you know, yay. Well, that's the entertain part. Right. We gotta do all those things. Yep. If you wanna support us in our mission to connect, educate, and entertain, if you believe as we do that getting everyone in the world to train for just six months would make the world a dramatically better place, please consider supporting us by buying something, coming to an event, sharing this episode with someone, or perhaps...

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Jeremy (04:24.546)

How many people out there do you think still love social media?

Jeremy (04:33.111)

My first initial answer was going to be the people that use it. But the more I thought about it just now, I was like, no. We both use it. Do you love it?

Jeremy (04:44.994)

to some degree. But there are things you appreciate about it. Yeah, and even when I said the people that use it, I was thinking of people that like, they make it their job. Like they're media influencers or martial artists that use it a lot. But even then, like they- One could make the argument that I fit that description. Yeah. And I still hate social media. Yeah, and I was gonna say, we both have met people that do that for a living and even they hate.

The trolls that come in and so there's a lot of it that they that they don't enjoy So what we're gonna talk about today is We're social media Facebook YouTube Instagram tick-tock Twitter Etc. You know, we're not gonna go we might talk about some things that seem platform specific, but we're gonna talk more generally. Yeah We're gonna talk about where it's been good. We're gonna talk about

where it's been less good and my personal prediction, and you know, this may or may not be news to you, on where I think things are heading with social media. I've got a reasonable track record for things like this kind of in the marketing space. I'm not gonna say I'm anywhere close to perfect, but I've got a pretty good idea where things are going to head.

When we think about social media, for most people, just by numbers, the first platform lots of people were using was Facebook. Yeah, well, because that's all there was at the time. Well, we had MySpace before that. Yeah. And by numbers, not by percentages, but by numbers, MySpace was the first really big one. Yeah. But before MySpace, there was Friendster. And before Friendster, there were other things, right? Social media.

has kind of been there in some form for a very long time. The way that, if you remember the early days of Facebook and what that was with, remember Poke? Like the Poke app, and some of you that might be a little younger don't remember the early days of Facebook. Yeah, there was a function within Facebook where you could poke someone. A lot of that is really throwback to something like AOL Instant Messenger and the way people were using

Jeremy (07:01.334)

that there was a social component there, whereas most of those apps now are, nobody really uses them. But for things that are kind of similar, it's more a replacement for text messaging, kind of like WhatsApp. That's kind of the way people use WhatsApp, even though it can do a lot more. It's, for most people, pretty straightforward. But I think the reason Facebook, though, is the first one people think of is, even with MySpace, and again, some of these,

younger audience listening are going to be like, what is MySpace? But MySpace and Friendster and all those didn't have as easy a tool to communicate with other people. It was way more difficult and Facebook was really the first one that made it very simple and easy to connect with other people. MySpace was there and MySpace was getting there, but what MySpace allowed you to do, that was ultimately their downfall, was you could customize the code.

to your page. And it created circumstances where people were, who didn't know how to write HTML, were bugging it up and it could crash your browser. And that happened enough and there was some, there was no protection from people trying to embed infections in there and eventually people just started to go, this thing over here is new and shiny and does everything else and doesn't crash.

Yeah, and it just kind of started to shift And in the early days it was great And and I remember saying To people who were kind of long holdouts I feel like I have better quality conversations with people that i'm following on social media when we get together because instead of saying What have you been up to I can say I saw that you did this. Yeah. I want to know more about it It just felt more engaging Yeah, I can see that and for martial arts

we started to see communities forming. I don't think it's a secret. I don't think very many people will disagree that the internet has been absolutely huge for martial arts because for most of us, we grew up in areas that had a few martial arts schools and many of us existed in these martial arts bubbles. Where...

Jeremy (09:25.418)

whether it was discouragement or outright ban of cross training or a misunderstanding of the way other people, it doesn't really matter why. Or just not knowing. Or just not knowing that we were in these bubbles. And martial arts for the 50, 60 years prior to the internet broadly reaching people in the mid to late 2000s.

didn't change a lot, didn't grow a lot. Yeah, I mean, I think, and part of that is just accessibility. When I was a kid and wanted to learn martial arts, I had to go to the phone book. And I'd look in the yellow pages and look through martial arts schools. Or go to the library and get a book and try to figure out what the sequence of poorly shot, black and white photos meant. Or buy a magazine that in the back, you could get videos and DVDs that you had to be sent to you in the mail.

That was it. Yep. Pretty much. I mean, maybe a rare occurrence that you might walk by a school. And there were seminars, but knowing about them was really difficult. Correct. Yep. And we've had plenty of people on the show who existed in those times. And they talked about, if you wanted to learn, you might almost become a groupie and follow so and so to all the seminars you could get to from that person. Yeah. Because what else were you going to do? Mm-hmm.

So there's kind of the early days of the positive side of things. But things tend to balance out. There tends to be corrections. And for every person who likes a thing, there tends to be at least some portion of people who dislike the thing. And I think the very first resistance that social media, martial arts social media created was

changing those things, changing the kind of the time capsule approach that this is how it's been done, this is how it should always be done, this is what so-and-so wanted us to do. And there were people who tried to really clamp down. And I don't know that there are people out there who said, you know, my students are not allowed to be on social media because of...

Jeremy (11:55.182)

martial arts they might be exposed. I'm sure somebody tried that. It was probably more, you know, oh don't join that group, that group's full of, and we still see that today. Absolutely.

But that push died, that effort didn't really work very well. We live in a time now where it is accepted, generally accepted, that cross training is available. There is a wealth of information that grossly exceeds what any of us will ever be able to spend time in. Yep.

And that creates some challenges. The fact that no one will ever be able to do everything, master everything, learn, understand, teach everything, means we have to make choices. And it is from those choices that I think social media hijacks us and steers us in certain directions. Yeah. The major pro of social media is being exposed to so many...

interesting ideas, so many people, so many possibilities, options. The downside is the exact same thing because how do you make those choices? Now if we look at where we are, you know, we're recording this in 2023, end of July 2023, most people understand that on social media platforms there is

some manner of algorithm that decides what you should see, because there are more things going on than you can physically see, look at, right? There are ways to adjust those and look at it chronologically, but most people don't do that. So what do we tend to have? Those algorithms tend to reward one of two things, things that we already know, like, engage on, or things that are so far out of that, that they make us upset.

Jeremy (13:55.338)

Remember these algorithms are not written specifically for martial arts and what we tend to have are I want to see my friends pictures of their kids and children and I want to get really mad about politics. That is how most algorithms end up being Curated guess what you're the one training them. Don't don't shoot the messenger here. I didn't design it this way And it leaves us without a lot of the stuff that most of us would consider substantive

So if we apply that kind of dichotomy, what are we being shown? We're being shown stuff from our martial arts friends, our martial arts school, competitions they go to, rank promotions, stuff that is positive, warm, fuzzy, but let's face it, you could spend a hundred hours looking at it and it doesn't do anything for you. It does not advance your understanding. It does not...

make you as a martial artist better. Now if you're a martial arts school, putting out that sort of content is absolutely wonderful because, and here's a little bit of a behind the scenes, I work with a number of martial arts schools and one of the big things I tell them, I want you to get your logo on photos and post them all the time. And if you do and you tag people in your school, then...

The algorithms on most platforms are going to make sure that other people see them, and some of those people might go, oh yeah, I'm interested in training martial arts, and you might pick up a student. The other side of that dichotomy, the politics, the stuff that makes you mad, well, how many times have you been shown a post in, I'm sure you're in a bunch of martial arts groups, I am too, a post that somebody puts up that's just...

They're just stirring the pot. They're just being a jerk. There are definitely people out there that do that, for sure. They're just trying to create controversy. Yep, I mean, and there are some that I've seen where one of the rules of the group is, do not post about this, and here's why. And then at least once a month, someone will post about the thing that they were specifically asked not to post about. But it's really not about that, it's moment, right? And...

Jeremy (16:14.678)

So we spend our time looking at the warm, fuzzy stuff that really doesn't advance us. We spend our energy on the negative, divisive stuff, which leaves a huge amount of material in the middle that we don't really address. Guess what? That's the same stuff that we spend our time on when we're not online. It's the stuff that if we go to a seminar, if we go to a class, it's the meat. It's the important stuff. It's the stuff that helps us progress.

It's the stuff that is the foundation that allows for the worm fuzzy, or gives us the material to argue with.

It's also not really sexy. Yeah. I mean that's what I was gonna say It's that's it's the mundane stuff if I put up a post in a group about The position and placement of a retracted hand Right you and I might have fun in person kind of nerding out and go. Okay. Well, I could have my hand up here I can have it down here my hip. What if it's down below my hip? What if it's in front and on my rib cage?

What if it's vertical in those places, right? Like we probably come up with seven or eight different positions from that retracted hand. And that might be an interesting conversation, but that conversation is not going to be terribly interesting online because it misses the physical component that we kind of need to shoehorn in to make it interesting. Now it very well could turn into.

Well, it has to go here because that's what so-and-so said, or that's what my instructor said, or doing it in this way is wrong and dumb.

Jeremy (17:57.726)

And why do those comments tend to come up?

typically from what I would say close-minded people, people that are not willing to look outside of their own. I would have said that until recently. Really? Okay. Yeah. Because... And...

Jeremy (18:16.366)

I forget who said this, this might be a Mike Tyson quote, but I might be wrong. Social media has made a lot of people comfortable saying things because they're not gonna get punched in the face. I don't think that's a Mike Tyson quote. And I know that I'm not getting the quote right. Anyway, but the sentiment stands. Right? If you're a jerk on the street to strangers or to your friends or your family, they're gonna call you out on it. There's a consequence. Yeah, right?

What is the consequence of being a jerk online? It's pretty minimal. There's always somebody else you can be a jerk to, right? So for people who enjoy or are hardwired into or don't even realize, but they are getting something out of acting in that way, social media exacerbates, it supports that. They have an avenue to do that. Have you ever been part of a group discussion where you've got five, six, 20 people engaging?

positively Constructively talking about a subject. Maybe it's more Schwartz. Maybe it's not and then one person jumps in and they blow the whole thing up Yep. Absolutely not even with anything of Intelligence but just Right and that becomes a really strong negative. Yeah And what have we done to try to correct that if you follow me personally on Facebook? I'll post some

rather interesting questions from time to time, sometimes about martial arts, usually more about life, and all often set rules. It's like, you can't talk about this, or this. If you do, I'm gonna delete it. And usually we get pretty far before the conversation dies because somebody pops in or...

Jeremy (20:02.638)

where we limit it with a group, right? Like there's a group and I watched a group the other day have a group discussion about kicking someone out of the group. I saw that as well. You know the one I'm talking about. I do. And I found that really interesting. So we try to set up these barriers to keep that stuff out, but it's actually those opinions that create the controversy, the counter ideas that make it interesting. And it's really hard to have

digital discussion about subjects that are best expressed with physical movements, understanding and not have the counter opinion and now it just becomes kind of sterile and boring. Yep. Really we can summarize this as the con for martial arts as individuals really comes down to a

core ability to substitute in-person conversation, discussion and training into a digital world.

Yeah, I have found myself not using much social media for a lot of those reasons, except Facebook. And just because I'm old. And that's the one that I use a lot.

But I also recognize that the benefits of using a lot of social media we talked about was for school owners, people that for PR and marketing and stuff, and that isn't me at this point. So I'm not I'm finding myself pulling away from and not using TikTok and never use TikTok. But, you know, social media like Instagram and Twitter and stuff like that. It, you know, as an aside, let me speak to this as an individual and as someone who.

Jeremy (22:01.486)

coaches, businesses, and school owners on this stuff. There are different social media platforms for a reason, because different people want different things out of social media. For example, I find TikTok to be the easiest platform to kind of train towards the stuff that I want. It's pretty rare that martial arts stuff goes up on TikTok that I don't see it. I rarely see someone say, oh, I saw this post from so-and-so, I'm like, I know who that is. I know who that is, I saw that post, right? Because I train it.

Jeremy (22:34.166)

Lost my train of-

Jeremy (22:37.77)

There's nothing that requires you to use all of them. You use social media the way you want, platforms you want, and they're tools. And, you know, for you, it's a tool of probably staying connected to people, some entertainment. Yeah, yeah, it's mostly connecting to people. Not so much for entertainment, but staying connected.

Sometimes it's staying connected through messenger and actually chatting with people and sometimes it's just like oh, oh Michael Johnny did that today Oh, okay. That's cool. Like just Stay connected in that way. Yeah, and that's kind of where I'm at when I use it Personally, it's you know, who's doing what that I want to stay up on and I make heavy use of the hide forever You know, I don't want to mute unfollow whatever it is Yeah, because I don't need to be subjected to BS that I am not interested in or toxicity

But when I use it wearing, you know, the whistlekick hat, the ambassador hat, you know, whatever hats I'm wearing that are not personal, I'm looking at it a little bit differently. And I'm trying to create things that make someone who is using it as an individual find something more positive. You know, I'm trying to stand out from the crowd in a way that is positive.

that does support these values that we've spoken so much about on this show, this connect, educate, entertain. I'm always trying to produce content that people want to connect with. Yeah. Stuff that people find worthwhile. Yeah. And hopefully learn something, you know, maybe what they're learning is, is my perspective and it makes them think, right? I mean, there's, you know, it's all we've ever asked you to do on this show is think about what we're talking about.

And that would be my encouragement to school owners too, is that if you're gonna put stuff out there.

Jeremy (24:45.122)

Don't approach it in a negative way. There are a number of school owners that I've talked to over the years, some that I've consulted with, some that I have not, and my first rule, and I don't have a lot of rules, but the rule, number one rule is don't be negative. Don't be a jerk. I don't believe that politics has a place within training. I think in fact, the exact opposite. I think bringing people together of different opinions, you know, from the world is a benefit.

and your school does better in that way. And I think especially in this time when we are so divided on seemingly everything, you know, if you, you could post a picture. Here's the best ridiculous one. I see people actually get worked up about the notion of pineapple on pizza. Like legitimately get worked up. That's insane. Yeah, it's a food. You don't have to eat it.

I don't like pineapple on pizza. I don't understand why you like it, but that's fine. Right? I think actually I do like pineapple on pizza. It's really good.

People like to get worked up. Don't feed that. Feed the other side of them. Feed the part of them that is desperate to find positivity in this world and let your school be a place that exemplifies that. I think the thing that many people forget is that, or maybe they don't realize, negativity.

breeds negativity, that it grows and it will become cancerous. And it doesn't have to be, you don't have to be negative. You don't have to be, but there are a couple of things at play here, one, we talked about the social media algorithms that tend to reward that, and then two, we are actually hardwired to respond stronger to those negative things. There's been plenty of research on this and...

Jeremy (26:45.206)

This is why, if you really dig, there are some people of prominence that are involved in social media that do not personally use social media or permit their children to use social media. It is a tool and you have to recognize that every tool has an upside and a downside. And the major downside is that social media, the way it is built because of the way we are built, is always going to reward negativity. And this is why, sadly, there are a number of people out there who have tried to build brands.

And there are a number of them within the martial arts world I'm thinking of some of them right now that their whole brand has been responding to trolls and Growing their following by Creatively responding to trolls. Yeah, guess what happens when they try to pivot out of that? nothing Absolutely nothing and this is why if you look at what we've done on social media over the years I have insisted on us remaining positive and

and doing all the things that we stand for. And if you compare our social media numbers to some of these other brands, they're tiny. They're, I'm thinking of one out there now.

Jeremy (27:58.614)

I'm not gonna give away anything, but I'm thinking of one now that probably has somewhere between 50 and 100 times the social media presence we do. I will guarantee that our financials look better. Guarantee. Because if you follow, if you hate watch or if you watch because it gives you something to hate, right, which those are two different sides of things. Do you want to spend money to support that?

Good point. Nobody's out there hate wearing a t-shirt. Yeah, that's true. But we have plenty of people who wear whistle kick stuff because it stands for something that they want to be associated with. Yeah. Right. And this is the difference between cultivating the following and building a brand. Yeah. But if anybody out there does want to hate wear a whistle kick shirt, by all means. Podcast One Five, you might as well save 15% to hate wear. You could set it on fire. You could film it. We still make the money. I don't care.

Jeremy (29:00.998)

Where is this headed? That's a good question. So you said you have an idea of where it's headed. If you look at technologies over time, most technologies don't get off the ground. But some of them get embraced. And we believe that they are going to save us from ourselves, that we become very immersive. And to give you the nerdiest example, because this is where I figured this out.

Back in the day when people created webpages by handwriting code, because yes, I am that old and yes, I did do this. I wrote my first website in 1994 by hand. Where's the closing brace that I'm missing? This was also back before you had.

Jeremy (29:53.826)

text editors that were designed for this purpose, but I digress. Frames. If anybody's real nerdy and remembers early internet days that we had frames where you would divide a page into a section, and so clicking on something here might change what's in this section, right? We've completely gone away from that, but when frames were added to the HTML set, everybody used frames. I remember doing a website where it had like six frames.

It was like all this like getting the math right was annoying never would have worked on a phone and Then I as everybody went to frames and then everybody started pulling back from frames And there were some times where frames were used, but it was rare and it was like, okay

We tried this thing. We figured out, we threw it at everything. Yeah. It works in a few cases, but not very many. We found better ways to accomplish the same things.

pendulum swung out and it swung back to correct. Now in the case with frames it didn't swing very far the other way. Yeah. But one of the things I've been telling my clients now because I see this happening as people become more resistant for whatever reason to social media was on actually on a meeting in a meeting with someone yes yesterday's we talked about they're starting to work with the team. Yeah. Doesn't use Facebook. Just flat out doesn't use Facebook.

We went all digital. Everybody's marketing went digital. Newspapers died, magazines died, it all died. And now it's starting to come back the other way. What am I telling my clients? I want you to make posters. I want you to put ads in the newspaper. I want you to put up signs in front of things. Analog, offline, because the pendulum is starting to correct. Now, it will go the other way. It'll keep going.

Jeremy (31:48.578)

how much we lose on the digital side, I don't know. There will probably be some consolidation in social media. We'll probably see some platforms die off. There are a lot of them out there. In fact, if you look, there are probably 30 to 50 social media platforms right now that you could use. You haven't heard of most of them, but they exist. And they have large followings by sheer numbers. A lot of those will die off because people are only gonna want to invest in certain.

Jeremy (32:21.55)

pendulum swings back and forth. It happens in martial arts.

we went all the way out on, it's gotta work in MMA, it's gotta work on the street. And that's been pulling back too. Well, and even within styles, you have swings. So, yeah, no, I agree. So that's where I believe things are going.

I want everyone to understand that this is not a blanket disparagement of social media. This is not us saying you shouldn't use social media. It's also not us saying you should. If you look at social media openly, honestly as a tool, if it serves you, if you derive more value in using it than in not using it, then use it. Then use it, yeah. Be aware of the pitfalls. Be aware of the fact that it is designed to hijack that primal part of you.

that makes you respond to big and negative, extreme and unhealthy and argumentative topics. If you're a school or otherwise engaged in martial arts business, recognize that it can be the most economical way to reach people. I'm opening a school. It opens probably right about the time this episode's gonna post. There are social media pages and events and things scheduled and I'm paying for ads.

But I'm also doing offline things, right? It is an arrow in my quiver, so to speak. No, that's a good analogy, yeah. Right. You probably wanna have more than one arrow. Yep. And you probably, oh, I'm gonna make a Hawkeye reference, which kinda kills me. Oh, ha ha. The worst Avenger, just by so much. You might have different arrows that accomplish different things. Some of them explode, some of them don't explode. You might have darts.

Jeremy (34:17.706)

I dig it, I dig it. And I don't just hate Hawkeye because I'm the better Jeremy than Jeremy Redder. Ha ha ha.

Jeremy (34:31.853)

Anything else? No, I think we're good. That was good. Good thing they had that. Yeah, I appreciate everybody being here. Thank you. If you have additional perspective, if you have things that you wanna add in, if you have questions, I mean, join the Facebook group, martial arts, sorry, the Facebook page. We've retired the group. If you go to the group, it mentions the page. So by all means, you'll end up there. And it's a perfect example. We had to make a change because Facebook made some changes in things. And so we've shifted from

a group to a page, whereas I know when we launched, I think it was just me back then, I did a bunch of research, should this be group or should this be page? And it made sense to make it a group. Yeah, and now it makes sense to have it a page.

Go check that stuff out, go see the post, follow us all over on social media if you want to. If you don't, the best way to stay in touch with us is actually our newsletter. And you can sign up for the newsletter either at whistlekick.com or whistlekickmarshallartsradio.com where every single episode we've ever done is available. You could tip us or you could create some kind of recurring contribution via Patreon at patreon.com slash whistlekick. My email address is jeremy at whistlekick.com, Andrew at whistlekickmarshallartsradio.com, and that.

is all for now. Until next time, train hard, smile, and have a great day.

Yay!