Pride of the Internet

It’s not enough that Pride II is drop-dead gorgeous and has a widely-known and deeply-respected captain. She also kills it on social media, thanks to the efforts of Patrick Smith

When a planned Tall Ships America conference session on best social media practices was abandoned after the event went virtual, it left us no choice but to talk directly with Pride II Programming Coordinator Patrick Smith.

Marlinspike: Patrick, your title of “programming coordinator” obviously encompasses a lot of different responsibilities.

Patrick Smith: It’s really a catchall. I change the light bulbs, I change the air filters in the office, and then I coordinate our guest crew program. I’m coordinating the upcoming ‘Deeper Dive’ virtual lecture series. As Jan would say, I wear a lot of hats!

MS: How’d you get the hat that says “social media” on it?

PS: I got into the fleet in the beginning of 2014 as a deckhand, but I’ve always taken an interest in the office side. I started to learn our [customer relationship management software] Salesforce, and I knew one of the people that had this job at the time, so even as a deckhand I would email her photos.

Then in 2016 we were in the Great Lakes, in Chicago, it was just easier for the ship to take over the Instagram. And so I started doing the Instagram. It was pretty funny because I had to go to Captain [Jan] Miles for every post to have him look it over, to make sure it was okay. Trying to explain some of the quotes or captions to Cap was always a fun experience.

So I started with the Instagram, and then I got an internship with the office that fall. That was the trial by fire. I was suddenly working with all the channels, Twitter, Facebook, trying to figure out our YouTube channel, get that started. And now, zoom, it’s 2022 and I am coordinating our social media.

MS: Over those five or six years, you have built a reputation for doing a great job with Pride II’s social media. Can you talk a bit about the organization’s media strategy? Who develops it? Who implements it? What are its goals?

PS: We as an organization work together to create quality content. I am responsible for implementing our social strategy it but it’s kind of a project-to-project thing. Our social media content falls into a handful of categories. There’s the simple, ‘post a pretty picture of the boat’ and that’s something I can do any day of the week. And then there’s the more informative posts, where we talk about caulking, points of sail, different things like that. And for that, I usually double back to the ship’s officers just to make sure everything I’m saying is correct. We’ve really built a pretty cool system, a cohesive team, when it comes to our social media.

Jan and Chief Jeff Crosby have been really good about getting content to the office for me to work with. I can always reach them for clarification or caption help.

When it comes to marketing things like day sails, deck tours, guest crew opportunities, that falls on me to just get the word out.

We’re really lucky in that we’ve got a beautiful boat that’s got a 40-plus-year reputation, going back to [the original Pride, launched in 1977]. The boat’s no stranger to a lot of people, and social media plays a good role putting the pieces together on that. I can’t tell you how many times somebody will comment, “Oh, my father used to take me down to the shipyard to watch the boat be built,” and then they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t realize I could do guest crew!”

So we’re lucky in that the boat has a reputation, and our social media just kind of helps us tell more of that story and get it out to people.

Ninety-nine percent of our social media is organic. We don’t do any ads, or targeted ads. We just don’t have the budget for it. And a lot of it is posted real time, and that’s a personal thing for me. I’m not a big fan of Hootsuite or any of those scheduling apps.

In terms of our goals, reaching new fans and growing our following is one. We also strive to keep producing quality content that our followers enjoy.

Captain Jan Miles is comfortable providing content for Pride II’s social media

MS: That puts pressure on you to be available 24/7.

PS: Yeah. But if I manage my time correctly, I’m able to do it, a little post here and there.

If there’s a Coffee with the Captain tomorrow — which I believe there is — it only takes five minutes. The organization early on built a pretty comprehensive digital archive. We’ve got a lot of potential content filed away, and the folks that came before me did a really good job organizing it by year and location and with all sorts of details. We’re set up for the kind of original content we produce.

And then there are times where we schedule things out, and Facebook Business Suite has made that really awesome. You don’t really need Hootsuite anymore. You can schedule things a lot easier from Business Suite, which is really great. And it crosses over to Instagram, if you want to have it do that.

For fundraising, our annual appeal, Giving Tuesday — that stuff’s all scheduled out. But anything else is, for the most part, real time.

MS: Do you sit down at the beginning of the year and say, “OK, we want to focus on hiring seasonal crew in early spring, and then start promoting the guest crew opportunities when we get to mid-spring, and then we have a fundraiser that we want to focus on…” Is there scheduling at that level?

PS: Sort of. The social media just kind of follows whatever scheduling we’re already talking about for the ship itself. We’ve committed to the Mustang Survival Annapolis to Bermuda Race, so that guest crew leg was posted. Now, there’s a waiting list with 10 people on top of the 6 people that already have spots.

As things are scheduled, we start telling people about them, but we’re still in this pandemic, which is proving to be a pretty big challenge. For instance, we’re still trying to lock in our Great Lakes schedule. We can tell people we’re going, but until things are locked in, we can’t really do much more than that. Once things are locked in, we can start rolling out announcements.

Fundraising — that’s pretty consistent year to year. A couple months out from Giving Tuesday, we start letting people know it’s on the horizon. And then we’re counting down to Giving Tuesday.

Annual appeal stuff, we don’t really hype that up as much until it’s end of December. Then we just start cranking out content for that, announcements for that, email campaigns for that. Social media just really falls into the greater toolbox of communications and marketing strategy. We rely also on our email lists, direct mail. Our annual appeal envelopes that go out to folks, and letters. There’s folks that have been following our boats for 40 years, and that means a portion of our fans are not on social media, which means we need to reach them through different avenues.

MS: Understood. Different social media are associated with different markets. Boomers are more likely to be on facebook than tiktok, for example. So how do you decide how much effort to put into each of the various social media outlets?

PS: On facebook, we can pretty much put any content we want. It can be a sassy post with a fun picture of the boat offshore, or it can be an informative picture of the boat next to a historic lighthouse, and that gets eaten up. Anybody of any age can appreciate that.

Our Instagram, generally, is more heavy visuals with a little less information, until people reply with, “Hey, can you elaborate on this?” And then our Twitter is one of our workhorses, so to speak. That’s where we make announcements and things like that.

Our YouTube channel’s been a fun thing to grow over the last pandemic year. I think at the start of the pandemic, we had maybe 110 subscribers. Now we’ve got 410, which isn’t a lot to write home about, but that’s growth! And there are a lot of people that have kind of fallen out with facebook, over some of facebook’s policies. So YouTube has been a nice place to start putting some content for folks that are trying to get away from social media.

And then you’re going to think I’m crazy, but we do presentations at things like senior centers, which is not quite social media, but it’s part of that communications and marketing toolbox. Jan and I partnered up and we gave three lectures to senior centers in Baltimore County at the end of last year, and that helps us reach folks that might not be able to make it to the ship during the pandemic or might not be interested in social media.

We don’t have an official TikTok yet. Jeff Crosby and I both have personal TikToks where we have some fun with Pride content, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next year or two Pride’s got a TikTok. It’s pretty new in the tall ship world. I think only a few tall ships probably have them. Clearwater, who comes out with some really good content, has a TikTok.

It’s kind of funny, but in this industry it seems like we’re always a little behind the curve. My understanding is that most tall ships created facebook accounts around 2009, 2010, about three years after Facebook went public for anybody with an email address in 2006. So there’s a little bit of a learning curve, but each platform kind of has a style and we try to cater the content to that.

MS: Looking at your YouTube channel, I see little clips that might be a minute long, and then you’ve got the entirety of your Coffee with the Captain episodes, running close to an hour each. You’re all over the map!

PS: A lot of people don’t like watching Coffee with the Captain live on facebook, so we try to keep up with uploading the episodes to YouTube. Also, YouTube has a handful of more informative-style videos from our volunteer historian, Pierre Henkart. It’s also where our old traditional Tuesday video series lives. So YouTube’s kind of like a catchall where you can find our longer video content. It’s something that we’re still trying to figure out, because we’ve got Instagram for the flashy, fun stuff.

Just showing how quickly the world moves, three years ago you wouldn’t be caught dead filming a video holding your phone in a vertical portrait style. That was a faux pas, and now with TikTok and Instagram Reels, and even Facebook Mobile... phone screens are huge, they up the whole device now. And so you film vertical, for the most part.

MS: Before you start filming, you’ve got to think, “How am I going to use this footage? Am I going to make a YouTube video?” Because then you’re going horizontal, probably.

PS: It’s kind of funny how that works. I’m constantly reminded of an expression from an old photography mentor of mine. “You got to shoot to edit.”

I’m not a professional photographer, and neither are our crew. They’re sailors. Jeff Crosby, who films a lot of our content, is a watch leader. So he’s going up on deck on his time off to do some filming and sometimes I’m like... I feel like such a jerk. I’m like, “Jeff, you should have turned the camera the other direction,” and things like that. I’m armchair directing, so to speak. But we’re really lucky. We’ve got a consistent stream of content coming from the ship, and it’s really cool what’s been created.

There’s a lot of ship watchers groups popping up all over Facebook, so anytime the boat moves, somebody’s watching. And our crew’s been really good about taking pictures. Jeff Crosby, even Jan Miles. He’s got a good eye. We’re spoiled with content, so it’s just a matter of packaging it up, putting a little bow on it, and getting it out to the world.

MS: Like a lot of people during these COVID times, I’ve been bingeing videos by cruising sailors, and by boatbuilders like Leo Goolden, who’s rebuilding the yacht Tally Ho. Some of the people who’ve invested in creating high-quality YouTube videos are actually generating significant revenue. Is there a possibility for a well-known, sexy vessel like Pride to generate revenue through its social media? Through YouTube?

PS: That’s definitely a as a deckhand dream! I can only do so and later landed an office much social media a week. I’ve got a lot of other responsibilities. But that’s definitely internship something that I’ve daydreamed about, personally. It’s kind of an all-or-nothing thing. This is a personal opinion. You’ve really got to make a go for it.

Is it a possibility? Yeah, but it’s a daydream, as of right now. The ship also wears a lot of hats. We’re the official ambassador vessel of Maryland and Baltimore. We’re a traveling attraction vessel almost, so there’s a lot going on. To also become a full-time content creator is a big jump.

I follow [Sailing SV Delos], and Andy Schell of 59 North… there’s a lot of stuff that’s on the backside that... a lot of editing, a lot of shooting, that just consumes a lot of time. And that’s time we don’t have as a small nonprofit at the moment.

MS: Tell us more about your Coffee with the Captain videos. That’s been one of your signature efforts during COVID times, and you’re doing these — is it every other week?

PS: As of right now, it’s every other week. Coffee with the Captain’s kind of a funny story. We were in Midland, Ontario during the Tall Ships Challenge in 2019. And we were trying to think of some way to get people down to the ship, and do something fun, do something different. And it was like, “Hey, Midland! Come down to Pride and have a literal cup of coffee on deck, and talk with Captain Miles and he’ll tell sea stories.” And I don’t remember what exactly happened. I think we had to cancel, or it didn’t go down, but that concept always kind of sat with a few of us. Fast forward to the pandemic, April of 2020, we’re like, “Hey, we need a way...” The boat’s rigged and sailing and we’re like, “But we can’t have any people on board.” I couldn’t even go on the ship. And I think it was actually Jeff Crosby’s idea. He’s like, “Let’s do a Facebook question-and-answer livestream.”

And so the first couple episodes were kind of funny. It was just Captain Miles answering questions as they were coming in and telling stories. Since then, it’s grown into this Saturday morning interview, almost.

Sometimes we’ve got special guests, which is really great. When when we’re touring the Chesapeake with the Star Spangled Banner National Historic Trail, it’s a great way to spotlight our local partners or heritage area or whoever we’re working with at each port. It’s just turned into this great tool to interact with our followers. And there’s a really loyal following to it. They’re pretty passionate about it. When we don’t have an episode, they’re not happy, and that’s as good as it gets, in my opinion. That’s a great thing to see people excited about.

MS: Do you brainstorm with Jan about what your topic is going to be? Is it that actually you holding the phone?

PS: No, I’m rarely involved. Jeff, Jan, and I usually talk about it in our staff meeting, or we talk about it sometime the week before. Nine times out of ten, it’s Jeff Crosby and Jan who film. Occasionally, they’ll loop me in. We’ve done a few Coffee with the Captains with special guests via Zoom, so that’s when I’ll get involved. I’ll create a slide show or add visuals. We had Peter Boudreau, the shipwright of the second boat and of the schooner Virginia. He came on as a special guest. We had Captain Phil from Bluenose II and I think we had Dan Moreland, as well.

When we go to the Great Lakes this year, it’ll be Jeff Crosby and Jan Miles running the show.

MS: Do Jeff and Jan enjoy doing this, or are they like, “Oh my God, we got to do another one of these episodes”?

PS: I think they enjoy it. There are definitely episodes where it’s just an update from the ship — “Hey, we don’t have a ton to talk about” —and they’re bummed out. So then we’ll be like, “All right, well, what can we do to mix this up?”

I guess the funniest Coffee with the Captain snafu was when we attempted to do one via zoom, where Captain Miles watched sailing scenes from movies and rated them.

What happened is, we got a DCMA complaint. The music got flagged by Facebook. But a number of people got to see Captain Miles review Pirates of the Caribbean, In the Heart of the Sea, and I think something else, and they were going nuts. It was amazing! And then it got taken down.

MS: Privateers of the internet!

PS: Right. It’s another project that takes a lot of time though. Every one of these video projects means that we’re not doing something else. It’s a trade off, but people really seem to enjoy our content.

MS: We’ve talked about generating content, sending your posts out into the world, but at the same time, you’re getting feedback — likes, comments, whatever. Are you guys pleased with the engagement you get? How much time do you spend interacting with people via social media?

PS: We love engagement. When you’re looking at the analytics, Facebook gives you “reach”, which is the number of people that have seen your content, and it’s a big number. That’s a great number. We had a video on Facebook last year get 2 million views, which is huge! That’s unreal! I jump out of my seat when I think about 2 million people seeing Pride of Baltimore II.

Reach is a cool number to tell people about, but to me, it’s not as real as the engagements. You can have 50,000 likes, fine, but then even 100 comments, that’s awesome! I’m happy with one comment, as long as it’s positive. Or shares... Anytime I see shares, it’s really great to see.

We definitely love that engagement and love interaction with our followers because there’s always a lot of questions. It’s tough to produce quality content that is comprehensive and packaged in a way that’s informative and interesting. We’ve actually seen a big spike on our Instagram engagement, we’ve been seeing a lot of comments and questions, and we’ve been posting a little more of our winter maintenance projects, some deck caulking and hull caulking, which people find interesting.

And that’s something that I have to keep reminding myself: just because it’s normal to us in the industry, something that we see every day, doesn’t mean that it’s not cool to somebody on the outside looking in. The simplest things can be interesting to people. Isn’t there an expression in sailing, “You got to get your head out of the chart”? You’ve got to look around.

Social media, it’s kind of similar. It’s so easy to get tunnel vision and be like, “Pretty picture, pretty picture, pretty pic-

ture,” and then you’re missing out on somebody who’s just interested on how you cook and eat dinner on a boat.

MS: As you said earlier, Pride II is fortunate in several ways — in being a very well-known and beautiful vessel, with a long history, and a rock-star captain in Jan Miles. What advice do you have for those who are creating content for more pedestrian organizations?

PS: Just keep creating content! I help volunteer manage a couple other social media accounts for few other organizations. I don’t see anywhere near the success that I see with some of my Pride content, but you just got to keep trying. You got to keep creating content. You got to kind of find your rhythm.

And the perfect examples of that are other ships in the fleet. There’s great content coming out of Sloop Clearwater, and it’s always informative. It’s woke. It’s totally different than what we’re doing, but it’s awesome. So you just got to find your niche and go for it.

MS: You’ve mentioned Clearwater a couple times. Are there other boats that you look to for inspiration?

PS: Oh, yeah. For just really cool content internationally, Barque Europa always comes in hot with some really cool content.

Another international ship I always keep an eye on is Statsraad Lehmkuhl. They do really good voyage updates, just keeping people posted on what’s happening on the ship. And then, of course, definitely a powerhouse in this area is Bluenose II. They’re really similar to us in terms of being an ambassador. They’re an incredibly beautiful vessel, and they do a really good job with their content.

And then I’m a history buff, so I follow Niagara, and they’ve come out of their shell recently. They’ve got some really fun content and they’re really good about interacting on social. I bet you’ve seen them. They’ll comment on other people’s posts. And that’s really cool to see. That’s one of my favorite things, is when tall ship organization socials take on a little bit of a personality. It’s really good to see the interaction there.

MS: What’s next with social media? Where are we going with this, as a society, as an industry?

PS: I was daydreaming about that yesterday… there’s the metaverse, there’s NFTs, there’s these non-fungible kind of blockchain-backed things that are kind of wild.

At some point, somebody sent us a picture of a Pride of Baltimore they made in Minecraft. and it’s like, “Wait a second. Whoa!” There’s a total world over there that I’m not super in-the-know about.

We don’t have a TikTok, but that’s something we are considering. It’s an active discussion, just keeping up with the times, and it’s going to be interesting to see over the next couple years. Now people are buying meta real estate, so it’s like, “Oh, man, what do we do with that?”

MS: Twenty-five years ago, everybody was rushing out to buy domain names, and then that turned out to be a waste of time, in most cases, because it turns there’s lots of virtual real estate out there! In fact, there’s an infinite amount.

PS: That’s a good comparison.

One thing I could get my soapbox about, is tall ships. Tall ships have a great community. You experience that firsthand at the conferences. It’s an incredible group of people, from a ton of different backgrounds, with a ton of different perspectives, and it’d be really cool to see that grow on social media.

We’re promoting our “Deeper Dive” lecture series, and so I reached out to you to ask if you could let people know. I also reached out to Picton Castle, Bluenose, and a few other contacts, and they shared our stuff, which is really cool. I’m a big fan of being like, “Hey, if you share my stuff, I’ll share your stuff.” And I’d love to see that kind of relationship grow across the fleet.

Grays Harbor, another great social media content producer — there’s no reason we can’t share their stuff! If they have a cool post? It saves me time. And anytime I can share somebody else’s content means I can spend more time on getting our guest crew program finalized for the year, because I’m not sitting on Facebook trying to come up with content.

MS: Because even for Pride — even for an organization that does it well — social media is not a full-time job at this point.

PS: Bingo. And I think that’s true for 90% of tall ships we can’t devote a full-time position to social media. We’ve got to do what we can with the resources we have. Which makes the presence of the fleet in general across social media really impressive, if you think about it. It’s people that are wearing a lot of hats, just like us, producing really awesome stuff. So it’d be cool to kind of see that community grow into social media, almost like a networking group, because in my opinion, it’s beneficial to everybody. We have a former Pride guest crew, who did two or three trips over the past couple years, who’s now on Europa doing the crazy Arctic expedition. That’s so great to see.

Yeah, it’s fun to see people throughout the fleet grow. Another example is people that have worked on Pride at some point in their career — we look at where they are now. So there’s Captain Sarah Armour, now the skipper of Brilliant. She’s a former Pride boatswain. That’s epic. So that’s great content for us. We’re happy to share that kind of news. Halee Grimes, former officer on Pride, is Senior Chief Mate with Grays Harbor. We’re all connected professionally, so it’s just a matter of spreading the word virtually.

MS: Since you mentioned it: the metaverse. Should we, providers of in-person, real-time experiences, feel threatened by virtual reality? Are we being swept towards the rocks of virtual reality, where people literally don’t go outside anymore, because the metaverse is so compelling and infinite?

PS: I think there’ll always be room for both. There’s that movie, Ready Player One, where everybody kind of lives in the video games world, but at the end the sky clears and they end up closing down the video game universe one day a week to get people out.

You, as a sailor, know there’s nothing quite... I mean, you can sit front of a giant flat-screen TV and have somebody spray a water bottle at you, but nothing’s going to compare to being offshore at night and there’s bioluminescence going by the boat and the briny air, and then you go to bed fully clothed… [laughs] nothing’s going to compare to that.

MS: Will we get into the business of making that experience available through virtual reality?

PS: If the technology continues to advance, yeah, I think that’d definitely be really awesome.

MS: I want to put on my headset and find myself at the wheel of Pride in a gale.

PS: That sounds pretty awesome, but I’m also a sucker for the real experience, as well.

MS: If we provide that experience, in the ultra-realistic way that the virtual reality people are promising, do we decrease demand for the real experience?

Back in the 20th century, as radio and TV became commonplace, professional sports teams worried that if they allowed their games to be broadcast, or televised, fans wouldn’t come to the stadium anymore. But that turned out not to be true.

PS: I think at the end of the day, if anything, it would potentially increase demand. Somebody gets to drive the boat offshore in a gale with everything up in the metaverse, and then they get out in the real thing and feel the wind on their face. To me that seems like the perfect way to do it.

MS: To complete my analogy to the sports franchises: not only did fans still come to the games, but nowadays those sports franchises make just as much money from their media contracts as they do from selling tickets and beer and hot dogs at the stadium. More, in some cases.

PS: Yeah, that’s no joke.

If you were to dig into our wishlist... we haven’t quite gotten to the Oculus or any of those kind of virtualreality things… but we’ve definitely daydreamed about an IMAX experience of Pride.

MS: Pride II in IMAX? I’d buy a ticket for that!

Be sure to check out Pride of Baltimore II on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube — but not TikTok, as yet. And give ‘Coffee with the Captain’ a listen!

Photo by Jerry Soto