The annual FIS Youth and Children’s Seminar took place on 30th September 2015 with the theme of “Social Media in Youth Sports”. Now in its 13th year, the Seminar included over 100 guests from 53 countries.
Walter Fust, President of globalethics.net and Ambassador and former Head of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation started the seminar by introducing the audience to ethical social media use.
Afterwards, Martin Kuswurm from Chaka2 provided an insight into how the social media world works including helpful tips for posting content which promotes a lifestyle.
Once participants had a good insight into the basics of social media, they were divided into working groups which were led by the FIS Media Coordinators Silke Tegethof, Mateusz Kielpinski and Bring Children to the Snow Coordinator Andrew Cholinski who shared their tips for using social media and answered questions from the participants.
In the afternoon, the seminar resumed with an introduction by FIS Secretary General Sarah Lewis, who stated that the strategy for use of social media by FIS is not only to communicate and inform but especially to inspire and excite practicing skiing and snowboarding. She gave up-to-date information about the launch of the new domain name dot.SKI, as well as the global ranking of International Federation’s social media.
Director of e-safety, Charlotte Aynsley focusing on Welfare of Children and Social Media looked at some of the dangers children might face when using the various platforms.
To close out the seminar participants were provided an update on Bring Children to the Snow by Andrew Cholinski.
The expansion of the Bring Children to the Snow campaign was shown by Tanja Frieden, Olympic Champion in Snowboard Cross, who presented the gosnow.ch program in her role as chairlady. She explained how the federal government and other national stakeholders had banded together to bring back school ski camps in Switzerland.
“The record number of participating nations in the seminar showed that there is a great interest in how we harness social media to help us in our goals to get more children to the snow and to build more interest in winter sports. We want to use social media to be effective and it can be a very powerful tool because the main users are the people we are trying to reach. I would like to encourage the FIS Development Programme nations to build up a strategy, to be thoughtful about the content they are posting and to be on the eye level with social media users” Ken Read, Chairman of the Youth and Children’s Sub-Committee concluded.
Source: fis-ski.com
