That seems to be the impression a lot of members are getting these days especially over the last couple of weeks, or are we just using the wrong tool?
Heres my thoughts on this after watching a live feed this morning from a well known veteran, love him or hate him he mentioned lots of things that almost every veteran group is trying to achieve.
That's the problem, every group, organisation, alliance, call it what you want you are all talking behind closed doors. How do you expect the veteran community to react and support all your events if they cant see your posts because they are not a member? This can be for several reasons and one of the biggest is you dont like the person who's running it, you may think they are self centered and in it for the ego or the money carrot is dangling in front of their noses or they have a better idea than you, so rumours are spread which then creates a chinese whisper with veterans jumping on the bandwagon and doing live feeds themselves publicly slagging off groups and veterans.
So how do you get round this problem without actually joining every group?
Up till now the only way round this is to create a post in your own network and share within every group that you're a member of and hope the fb politzi dont pick up on it and end up on a 7 day ban, you also have to hope that the group admins allow your post on their news feed, but if they dont like you then you're still not going to get your information out to the masses.
So now you are back to square one, you have important information that you think the veteran community should know about, you keep having to bump the post in your news feed to try and keep it near the top so members see it, or put it as an announcement, normally missed by the average veteran, as most are looking for anything new on the page feed or just fancy a catch up with their old mates. How many of you are guilty after reading a post and jumping straight in with a comment without reading everyone else's comments first?
Why would you join a Veterans Biker group if your not a biker, or an RCT group if your not a Trog. So you will never see the information that is aimed at you simply because of these reasons.
I will try and explain in terms most of us will recognise.
Almost all of us have set our networks up in a way we all know and that's as a Regiment or Battalion.
We all have our HQ ( normally a website or fb page) where all your main information is shared, its then sent further down the line to your splinter or regional groups (Troops, Company or Squadrons) each of these all work independently and have their own part one orders if you want to put it this way, with your main part one orders coming from your HQ if you need to reach the whole Battalion.
Now the camp you all live on (facebook) has more than one Bn plus lots of support Regiments all sharing the same camp and all doing the same thing as you but working to their own agenda.
So now you have all been activated for an operation but because you never knew what the others were doing only half the battlegroup turned up because they didn't know about it or thought it didn't include them because their main job was to protect the NAAFI ( you all know who we are talking about) joking aside How did we get past this before? I'll tell you how.
There was always one place where everything was kept under one roof and where every CO, 2IC etc etc knew about and if they wanted something published or information shared they went there and attended meetings on a regular basis, discussed any upcoming plans then left to share the plans within their own Regiments and believe me Facebook is not set up to act as a GHQ, yes it's great for doing what we are all doing within our own groups but that's where it ends. We are lacking one neutral central location where you can find any information you need that needs to shared or found that will help your own Battalion, a neutral location with no hidden agenda and is set up to provide information to the whole Battlegroup by comments from every source.
Facebook has been tried time and time again and has been proved that it isnt the right tool for the job.
I was once taught as a young nig, if it's hard to do and not working the way it should then try using the right tool as it was made to do a certain job.
I'm not saying that this platform is the be all and end all of everything we know, but surly it's worth a try before there is no Veteran community left to fight for.
If you have bothered to read all this then stop, rethink, ask yourself questions what are we doing wrong and why are we failing the very same people we set out to help.
We all set up our own groups with one clear vision in mind and that was to help Veterans but somewhere along the way some of you have forgotten this and hope that there is still a chance to save the community before all this in house fighting implodes.
MAKE THE CHANGE and become a force to be recognised as one unit. TWAS
If you have not read the CSCSA blog post or the one from last month then I would suggest you do as this explains other things about what we are trying to achieve.
