Dear Mr. Lynch

I appreciate your offer to help but the owner of the locomotive denies that they own it. The political situation needs to be solved before much of anything else can be done. When this is solved is anybody’s guess.
While there may be 1.7 billion users of Face book there are over 7 billion people so you are only reaching 2/7 of the potential audience. Within that group how many also use a more widely used platform?
The comment on the social club status comes from experience with organizations long before the internet. I have seen organizations of many types where if you did not do X, believe y, or are friends with Z you were not really a member. I have worked with females in railroading who had to overcome both the boys club attitude and the jealous wife issues. If I am going to work on a project I want to help the project and not see a self-promotion of social status by some arbitrary measure that seems to infect some groups.

Robby Peartree

Facebook can be a royal pain in the A$$, but it does serve as a useful tool at times. I am able to update it on a regular basis, easily, where I really need to be on my laptop to update our website. Our Facebook page has helped with promotion of our events, and it is just one part of the whole internet presence.

https://www.facebook.com/niagararailway/ with our website being http://www.nfrm.ca

It does sometimes help to see what others are doing on their pages on facebook.

Captcha can take more than "minimal effort" depending on your computer and your vision. I have good vision and I still often fail on the first one or two tries.

So, unless the content is something I really want to see, at that point I'll often say "screw it!" and not bother.

You claim to have extensive online experience. So you should be familiar with "bounce rate". Every obstacle you put in front of a visitor will cause some of them to "bounce", I.e. not bother to continue. Have to do a captcha? You lose some? Need to sign up or even just log in, you lose some (many folks have trouble recalling passwords). Sight loading slow, or otherwise being annoying? More folks out of here.

You want an interesting test? Find somebody's grandma and have her try to figure where you train is located and then try to buy tickets. Complete the whole process, including the hellhole that can be part of the payment process.

Again, the issue appears to be the individual user's computer settings with regards to Internet Exploder, not a general Facebook or conceptual issue.

One group to which I belong still has a director and a committee member that aren't on the internet--one for just being an old-fashioned Luddite, the other because he's 91 years old. Thankfully, we print out stuff for them and use that new-fangled Ma Bell technology.

"What problem, I don't see a problem?"

That Captcha was generated by Facebook. BigJim was able to duplicate it easily.

IE still has a significant market share. Having this happen to say 5% of your visitors isn't good.

Dear Mr. Mitchel,

Blaming your audience for not setting themselves up to hear your message because of a known issue is often called passing the buck. The notion that the idea that the problem is solely those that do not understand how to receive the message is an arrogant and ignorant view. I am not a full time computer programmer and 'I do not keep track of all the games Face book, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and everyone else are playing. In the end I see the computer age creating great difficulties for preservation on many fronts particularly in the documentation area.

This gets back to how do we communicate and educate people as to what we are doing. I can bring up technical terms to describe a rebuild of a piece of equipment but if the audience does not understand (or able to see) what I am saying then what use was the effort to do this. We have to communicate with as many people as possible. Blaming those people for not getting the Facebook message will only drive them away.

Robby Peartree

Ps. I lost an earlier post to programing and timing. Now Microsoft word and the sites program did not want to give me the option of pasting a post from word. Yup computers are the way to miscommunicate. Next auto correct will force a word misspelling due to poor programing which will piss off people who are so perfect they can only spell a word one way.

You apparently missed the several posts where others and I noted how we have to diversify our promotional reach.

There was a time when if you ran an advertisement or got a mention in your local newspaper(s), it was reasonable to assume that almost anyone that had any disposable income in your area would read it, because "everyone" read the local paper. Those days were long gone even before the Internet, and now the Internet has forced the issue further with diversification of reading habits and "news" acquisition. When television was only one to three channels in most places, people were transfixed by roller derby, Edward Murrow, and Walter Cronkite. Then cable TV came along with 500 channels. Now we have streaming Netflix and Hulu and Roku, and major players are scrambling to catch up.

The folks who are startled when a video or pop-up ad starts up on a web page, or the folks who are still befuddled by basic website navigation, are not the target audience for your Facebook videos or event listings. The young people who haven't managed to actually hold any piece of paper in six months except to throw away junk mail are not the target audience for the ads in your local newspaper. And the folks with 2.3 kids and two dogs in the suburbs are (probably) not the audience for your "Steampunk Express" ad in the local alternative weekly (but I've learned not to make such assumptions).

There's a reason professional advertising consultants and promotional consultants exist. And there are ways to learn their methods and manner of thinking without having to pay them full-time.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to NOT end up listed on "Web Pages That Suck." (Which, despite its snark factor and now-relative-obsolescence, is quite useful in learning what NOT to do with websites.)

,,

Josh, I think this says a lot about your web site more than it does your facebook. And IE isn't dead - a lot of businesses are still running Win 7 and earlier lease machines that default to IE. People plan their vacations at work when the boss isn't looking.

Best lesson: create valuable, easy to reach and navigate content and spread it over a variety of source portals. Worst lesson: do just one thing because it is your favorite and assume the rest of the world shares your prejudices. You have to reach your markets where they are, not where you want them to be.

Dear Josh
No one has answered why I have to give Facebook information that I do not want to so I can know what is going on in an organization. I am a member (out of town) of the Golden Spike Chapter but it may be time to reconsider that as I just received my annual renewal. If you only want to communicate to me via Facebook then I can send my membership money elsewhere. Only communicating current events thru Facebook will not reach me. The chapter recently had an important discussion of insurance. I did not find out about it on Facebook or the web site I found out about it in the newsletter.

Members of different generations sometimes do struggle with communicating with each other but if you limit the ways you communicate by only one form such as using Facebook to communicate reaching everyone it will not work. A lot of people my age group are busy with their families and do not have time for a lot of things and keeping communications easy to access is important. Having roadblocks put up for them by computer programmers or organizations will drive them off. Furthermore, many of the male friends usually see Facebook as something the wife uses to keep Grandma informed about the grandkids.

Limiting to who or how you communicate to others and its ability to reach the entire audience due to any bias creates a click weather if you recognize it or not. Those in the know and those who are not privilege to know. Have you used your newsletter and web site to the same degree to raise money? Do you post first on Facebook because it is easy and the others latter or do you release them at the same time? If the web site is static and Facebook is dynamic then you have a bias toward your Facebook visitors. When I go to certain web sites I get ads for the bay area because that is where I enter the internet. It is not where I am at so the ads mean little to me. Google maps, I particularly love when people create links with google maps and it wants where I am at info to get something unrelated. I then have to find it another way or in my case just go somewhere else.

Robby Peartree

What do you need to sign up for Facebook? Let's see. First name, last name = ok, you could completely make those up. Email address = could be a random free email address you create from a Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo-type account. Password = whatever you want. Birthday = Make one up if you want! Sex = Male/Female, who cares? Create the account, log into the email address, confirm it, and you're off to the races. Make something completely up, put a pseudonym up if you want. Are you an author and you use a different pen name, use that!

What will your PII (Personally Identifiable Information) be used for if you choose to post to Facebook? Let's see what happens when I log in. Sure, there are ads to view (one click here or there gets rid of them). Hey look, I can find my friends on here and see what they're up to. Facebook isn't some evil corporation that is using your PII for their own nefarious plans. They're not asking for a home address, a phone number, a social security number, bank information, and the soul of your first-born child. Anyone can create an account and be somewhat or completely anonymous if they so choose. Give me a break...

Robby (if that's your real name...) You only have to give Facebook two pieces of information.
1) Your name. Which, BTW, they won't try to verify unless it's obviously fake or somebody complains. Sign up as Jimmy Pinetree if you'd like.
2) An e-mail address. They do verify that, but it can be a "disposable" one you only sue for Facebook.
3) Birthday. So pick one at random, who cares and they will never know. They do this to verify you're over 18 or have parents permission.

They will, of course, pester you to enter more info, your hometown, schools, where you work, favorite teams. But you do not have to give them that info. In fact, the only info you have to give them is the same info that you gave this website when you signed up to use it. Everything else is voluntary and optional. You can control exactly how much info they have.

I get my information from the fact that I am part of the younger generation myself, and have experienced what I'm talking about. "Dead" may have been too strong of a word to use, but I can assure you that there is truth in my statement.

The numbers can be deceiving. The majority of my friends/peers have Facebook accounts. However, most of those people abandoned their accounts long ago, or use it only to communicate with relatives or play games.

When I check my Facebook feed maybe once a month, I consistently see posts on my feed from the same 10-15 friends/peers, and no one else besides family. this goes to show that only a small handful are actually active. Now, this situation may be different in other regions of the country. Given the interconnection that social media gives us these days, though, I would doubt it.

The point I was attempting to make in my original post is that museums might want to consider using other social media platforms. Every one of the options has its strengths and weaknesses, but simply trying out one of these options might be a good way to reach out to all demographics.

Internet Explorer is "dead" in the sense that Microsoft does not support it anymore, but "alive" because of the fact that many people (of all generations, I might add,) still use it. I would agree that organizations should still try to make their media accessible on IE.

Congratulations Bobharbison.

You caught me. Robby is not my legal name only my nickname my mother gave me and what most people call me. If you look at the Railroad History (published by the R&LHS) from the mid nineteen nineties you will see it spelled Robbie instead of Y like my parents said it was to be. So yeah I hide behind a false name.

Robby (or am I someone else) Peartree

Then since you are a part of the "younger generation", what other social media platforms would you suggest? Instagram has already been mentioned, and I'll jump in and say that I don't know many of my railfan colleagues on Twitter. Think you have a hard time getting people on Facebook, imagine trying to get them on a platform where you have "Tweets" and are limited to only 140 characters per posting.