To not embrace change is to embrace stagnation. I admittedly don’t follow many Coaster accounts on social media and just receive my news here. However, as someone has said, they need consistent content to try and get enough views to make their time worthwhile. The current enthusiast state is simply following the trends of the average enthusiast channel on social media. Vlogs are easy, cheap, and establish a personality for the channel while also letting people who feel the need to be seen be seen. I still enjoy the forums as a place to quickly catch up on construction or just glance at some discussions, but there can often be a feeling that there’s not much real discussion here. I see complaints on how these people don’t really know coasters and simply talk to the camera. However, personality and individual perception is what really makes a brand, Coasterforce overall has neither of these things. That’s what has made TPR or even Coaster Studios up and coming channels. They have a personality, face, and individual approach to coasters. I’ve no real suggestions for anyone involved in coasterforce because, well, I’m not quite sure what to suggest or help. Im a slightly involved bystander to the site and brand though, and I’m not sure the intricacies of the actual situation. This is simply what I’ve seen.
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You're right in that CF doesn't really have a "face" behind it, and that's definitely something which has made us fall behind now that vlogs have become such a thing.
Sort of in defense mode (to an extent, more explanation really), but I think it's because there's always been a fairly dispersed group of people behind CF, rather than one person, or a small handful of people, and that group are spread out all over the place. When forums dominated, that was excellent since we were covering everything, but in the age of the Vlog, it becomes an issue. Maybe for a CF Live you can put something together - a video of people enjoying a park, interspersed with ride footage doesn't necessarily need a face behind it - but what happens if you establish a "face" and the face of the brand can't make a particular trip?
If you look at the CF Facebook page "we" are covering parks all over the world, but, in reality, that's one or two people from the team at a park. You'll have noticed that "we" are often somehow at parks at opposite sides of the planet on the same day. That's great for a huge variety of coverage, but it doesn't allow for a CF face behind it. We're not all at the same place at the same time.
When I post from the Asian parks, I often get "can't wait for the POV" comments since there's this idea that there's one or two people behind the whole CF operation. Jerry is great at doing POVs from American and European parks while I don't do them for a number of reasons (equipment, difficulty in dealing with Asian parks, not my priority when I'm there).
If we were all to push out Vlogs (not something we're all good at or interested in doing), you would end up with 10 "faces" of CF. Smaller groups, or large groups with one clear dominating member, have been able to do well when it comes to vlogs since it's easy to establish a "face". Robb Alvey is always going to be posting for TPR, Shawn Whatsisname is always going to be doing TPW. We don't have that set up.
I don't know what the answer to that is. Do we find a CF "face" and then limit our content based on which parks that face can visit? I don't think that's an answer since it restricts the content in terms of the parks covered.
Away from CF and on a more personal note, I agree with what Ben said a few pages back about the CF Chat page on Facebook. I really like it. Yes, there's some repetition, and you obviously can't keep track of "topics" in the same way as on a forum, but there's definitely a personality to it and you very quickly start to recognise the more active members on there. Some of them are the posters from the forums, but a lot of them aren't, so it's definitely worked in terms of getting more people to interact with the "brand".
Pushing forum content on both the CF Facebook page and CF chat page definitely works, though it doesn't often translate to more activity in terms of forum comments. For example, once I'd finished the New Zealand trip report, I linked it on both pages and it jumped from around 400 views to 1,700 over a couple of days. It just shows that people ARE interested in reading forum content, but not necessarily interested in engaging in a more old-fashioned medium.
