Footbag Enthusiast Turned Social Media Maven

I’m Jonno Norton, proudly reporting for duty as the new social media guy at World Footbag! You’ll be hearing from me via tweets from @WorldFootbag, on Facebook at our Fan Page,  on the World Footbag YouTube Channel as we upload new content every week, and right here on the blog posting footbag news and history for your enjoyment 🙂

I’ve been a footbag kicker since I saw my first stalls in high school. Some older kids played legit footbag, or freestyle as it’s commonly referred to, and I was enamored on my first day of high school when I saw them playing their unique style at lunch. This wasn’t like anything I had seen before, though I had been hacking for quite some time very enthusiastically for just about all of junior high and middle school up until then. I quickly befriended them, and started trying to learn my first stall. It took me all of a day to finally get it consistently.

Conveniently, I was lucky enough to grow up during the time that the internet and a PC became a household item for most families, around 2000. I searched and YouTube’d my way to videos of professional footbag players from around the world, joined the IFPA, carried a sand-filled bag everywhere I went, and even got some of my local friends to start playing with me. We learned tricks from each other and advanced our tiny segment of the sport in our corner of the world.

Soon after high school I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue whatever I may find there 🙂 This proved to be a fantastic decision, helping to blossom my career in social media marketing as well as providing the fortune of meeting my lovely wife. I did not, however, meet any local footbag players. I was busy with the hustle and bustle of the city, and would mostly just run around Lake Merritt when I got the chance and shred in a few key places on my own. I did meet some casual kickers, but nothing permanent.

During that time I was fortunate enough to work with Dan Ednie on editing the footbag manual he an Vasek Klouda  (wiki) c0-wrote together. We also did a short social media run as well, promoting the manual for sale in PDF form. We’re very close now to re-releasing the manual as a proper ebook. Stay tuned for more details about that!

The Twitter community wasn’t primed for the footbag sport at that time, with only a few key players online and some barely active community pages.  Around then I put together some community profiles which are still in use today. They are @PlayFootbag and @FootbagBot.

@PlayFootbag is mostly famous for automatically tweeting new footbag videos posted to YouTube. It’s a hub for new footbag content and updates periodically throughout the day. I usually find really cool videos from other countries posted there; it’s pretty cool to see people shredding in Chile.

@FootbagBot is a ROBOT! Not really, but it runs on an algorithm that allows it to automatically retweet any tweet with the hashtag #Footbag. It’s meant to serve as a community hub for people in the footbag community to follow in case they miss a tweet they would have wanted to see, like somebody in there area calling out to local players that isn’t in their friends list. Most notably, I’ve been running the social media efforts at Flying Clipper for the past two years as well, which has been really fun.

I’ve been so happy to be able to participate in the growth of this sport in my own unique way. I feel like social media is the place to be these days, and it’s great to help some companies and the community overall in engaging with each other through social media. I definitely can say I love my job 🙂

— Jonno Norton