Social Media Policy

ERS values the support of riders who choose to follow and interact with us on social media.  We really enjoy seeing posts, stories and photos of riders out on the water with ERS equipment though we generally encourage moderate and reduced use of social media sites.

As a company that exists to enhance outdoor activity and peoples recreational lives we don't want to spend our own time glued to a screen, nor encourage it in others to the point of excess, when there is so much great stuff to see and experience - just by looking up.

It will not take a huge leap to assume most of us know one or more people that never seem to be off their phone. Device use crept into our lives and often develops into dependence that is seldom recognized or challenged.

The intent of each platform is to increase user frequency and interaction to sell more advertising placements to businesses. The platforms increase this interaction time through learning algorithms. The algorithms are designed to keep you checking in more (frequency) and keep you interacting (scrolling, watching and commenting).

The net negative societal influence has not been adequately understood or addressed and ERS feels social media and device use addiction has been normalized and requires change. Device use has become a routine of wasting hours a day - and accepting it as normal. 

We are not anti-social media, though we feel its current action is flawed and trajectory in a moral grey area.  It's a challenging to watch a generation of children grow up and never separated from their phone, and see the contradiction of an older generation whom the advent of social media has given some happiness and ability to connect with family and friends more frequently.

The disingenuous rise of 'influencers', the endless tracking and profiling and the false realities it builds and promotes are mostly traditional advertising methods given new clothes.  However, the level of manipulation is more intrusive and personal since it manipulates into interactions with our friends and families and uses peoples lives to fuel an advertising machine with never ending content. It's difficult for us to continue our involvement unchecked with that status quo, when we base our whole company ethos on actually making peoples lives better.

The platforms design their algorithms differently for users and businesses.  Businesses are pushed to spend for popularity and to compete against each other though bidding in that space. We ran ongoing tests and found that over 90% of our advertising spend was being sent to bot traffic.  The platforms didn't expect us to detail data check anything other than the statistics they provide to justify our advertising expense. In our testing and experience little interaction is real to the point of statistical significance.

The platforms encourage building a false narrative with fake followers and likes and it is done with the intent of setting unrealistic levels of interaction, which the business is then trapped into paying for to maintain their perceived level of popularity.

There are as many guides as google will direct you too with instructions of buying fake followers and likes through all social media platforms but anyone familiar with the platforms know the practice is in common use, as do the platform providers.  Significant numbers of business and 'influencers' take this step themselves to enhance their post likes and follower counts through bot farms and other similar bad actors.

The relative anonymity and vagueness of social media mean fraud is commonplace.  Everyone knows it, but few businesses will state it on record when it is much easier to play a role that keeps the machine turning especially when doing so has a perceived benefit.

We have never 'played the game' like other companies and it hasn't effected our popularity or commerical success. We've always run our business like a business we want to buy from, and made products that we ourselves want to use, and we've kept our social media intent limited and genuine.

For all the negatives, there can be positives. Instead, we focused on doing things we can do in a positive manner.  We can change our behavior and not engage in the negative aspects and use the platforms as a limited form of media for our business.