Flounder's Folly.

I am not a race promoter. Chico Racing I ain't. LLP is an attempt to learn these things, but not in an attempt to make a living off it, but to get a bunch of folks together for a good time, and maybe curse me under thier breath for making such a hard/evil/f--ing stupid course. Nor do I understand social media promotion. My blog is basic, and my attempts to promote this series online have been oh, shall we say, crude.

Well, both of these deficiencies came together and bit me in the ass earlier this week.

My friend made me a poster for free, which you can see in an earlier post. He is a great designer, a busy designer, and he designed me a great poster with a cool picture. He is not the villain here nor do I blame him a lick, as he did me a huge favour, took time out of his busy career, and made me some coolness; let that be clear. Everything would have been fine if I hadn't decided that hey, I am going to try and generate some hype about the races, and hopefully about fatbiking in Ottawa, because I have an awesome poster that's the Bolshevik-boozy business.

All I know about social media is twitter, facebook, and lame-ass blogs like mine (I mean really, look at it, and despair at the template-by-numbers appearance of it). But I figured, hey, I'll just put the poster on all the facebook pages I've liked. Now, I still don't know if that is a cool thing to do, but I did it, not thinking there would be any issues and perhaps with my judgement clouded a bit by enthusiasm.

Well there was an issue. It's call copyright infringement. Turns out the fatbike picture in the poster belongs to the fine folks at FAT- BIKE.com, whose facebook page, coincidentally, I posted a copy of my poster onto.

Imagine their surprise when they saw their own picture popped up. Now imagine their annoyance.

I didn't have to. They wrote me to diplomatically express their displeasure at seeing their materials used without being asked. To their credit, they were very cool about it, and explained where they were coming from, and all would be fine if I made a donation to support the website. I could still use the poster; they even said they would put LPP on their events calendar for the year; no hard feelings. Very large of them, considering how things could've gone...

I made the donation within an hour of reading the email. While it puts me in the hole before the races even start, I consider it the cost of a valuable lesson.

All that said, give Fat-bike.com your support. they are good people, just like my friend is, just like I am, mostly (me, not Fat-bike nor Greg).

-Flounder