Two recent articles in Yahoo Sports have raised some very useful questions about just how and why athletes should use social networking tools, or really, if they should bother using them at all.
The first, by Charles Robinson, detailed the way that NFL teams are creating “ghost” profiles — typically in the guise of attractive girls — to “friend” prospective players and then sift through their personal profiles in search of red flags.
As he wrote in “Social Networking a Potential Trap for Prospects”:
The woman in the Facebook picture is attractive, with auburn hair and icy blue eyes. She is flanked by several other women, each armed with an inviting smile and curvy features. Along with the photo is a hopeful note from the female “fan” asking to be added to a player’s personal networking profile.
The twist? These women don’t actually exist, at least not in the way that some unsuspecting NFL prospects are led to believe. Indeed, they are a figment of one NFL team’s imagination – a phony Facebook profile, used as a tool by one franchise in the pre-draft vetting process. A Trojan horse that, when used effectively, unlocks a door to a world of Internet pictures and information which most NFL teams are now consistently compiling to help polish their dossiers on draft picks.
The second, posted yesterday by Curtis Granderson of the Detroit Tigers, conveyed his frustrations with social networking, particularly when it came to establishing his own presence on sites like Facebook and MySpace:
Two years ago I signed on and made a public page on MySpace. The page is to get information out about upcoming events and things with my Grand Kids Foundation. Until recently I was only on MySpace, but I had a lot of people coming up to me telling me they were friends with me on Facebook. I know there are fan pages, but these were pages of people actually claiming to be me, and telling people they were meeting on Facebook that they were me. But, of course, it wasn’t me.
It’s not hard to imagine that these sorts of issues exist for athletes in many other variations.
Case in point: I’ve noticed lately as we’ve monitored our clients’ Twitter posts that the same profiles — often, of women with notably provocative background images — have shown up on all of them, and on the profiles of a large number of other athletes, too. I don’t know these people, or if they’re actually women, or what their interests or intentions are, but suffice it to say that their near omnipresence across so many athlete profiles raises an eyebrow for me, at the very least.
So in light of the potential dangers — which seem to be growing all the time — what is the real value for an athlete when it comes to using tools like Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter?
CONTROLLING YOUR BRAND
For us, the purpose of all of these services is to help maintain and extend an athlete’s brand. To do that effectively, athletes and their support staff (management, marketing, etc.) need to have as much control as possible over how those services are used while still managing to maintain overall authenticity.
That’s precisely why we place an athlete’s web site at the center of his or her online universe, allowing it to broadcast the overall brand message, and associated content that backs it up.
Beyond that, here’s how we feel about social networking where athletes are concerned. (Note: These are general guidelines and would vary from athlete to athlete, particularly in the context of any social networking campaign that might be employed for specific promotional purposes.)
- Know why you’re using social networking tools in the first place. To utilize them without a clear goal in mind at best dilutes an athlete’s brand and at worst, could cause serious problems.
- For the most part, we do not recommend using Facebook or MySpace for communicating with fans unless it is unidirectional. This runs counterintuitive to prevailing thoughts about social networking, but our belief is that these environments create more opportunities for problems than anything else. Both Facebook and MySpace allow the integration of external RSS feeds from an athlete’s blog or Twitter, and that can be all of the participation required by an athlete.
- In general, Facebook and MySpace can also be used simply to funnel users to an athlete’s web site. Both environments allow far less control, at least with regard to branding, than an athlete’s site has if properly built and maintained.
- Twitter presents the ideal place for communicating with fans provided that athletes keep their posts light and exercise good judgment. With that in mind, we recommend some sort of content oversight from an objective source to ensure that a well-intentioned post doesn’t go awry, or to deal with it immediately if it does. (And as I posted a little while ago, don’t use Twitter – or any of these tools — without a well-branded site to go with them.)
- In all of these environments — unless they’re being used solely for personal communications with close friends and relatives — we strongly recommend that athletes refrain from all personal communication with people they don’t know or know well. (Respond to fans in Twitter, but generally speaking, DON’T follow them.)
The bottom line on social networking is this: You do not know who you’re communicating with, or how they intend to use any information you share with them. Proceed with caution, or not at all.
Are your athletes not adults? Do they lack self control and common sense? Fans want to get to know the athlete not the athlete through your filter. And while I understand that it is your job to protect them and ensure they’re presented in the best light; the purpose of social networking platforms is for an exchange of information. If one sided information was all that was being sought, the athlete’s website would suffice.
People will try to mislead people sometimes, that is human nature but removing responsibility from the athletes is what fuels the perception that athletes are nothing more that coddled overpaid brats.
Jill,
Thanks for the comment — appreciate it.
I think it’s great for fans to get to know our athletes — in fact, we encourage it — and if you’ve had the chance to interact with any of them on Twitter, you’ll see that they all do an excellent job tweeting and are extremely receptive to letting fans know what is going on.
That said, as the popularity of web sites like TMZ, Deadspin and so forth show that there’s an substantive supply of people who think differently than you do about athletes, and search out and revel in their missteps. A veteran athlete with all the self control and common sense in the world would tell you as much. Sadly, it’s reality.
This post wasn’t intended to dissuade athletes from using social networking tools, or to suggest that they use them in an inauthentic way; in fact, I would strongly discourage anyone from doing that, and did in a previous post here.
It was meant simply to reflect the real issues that social networks can present, and how athletes — particularly the uninitiated — can best handle them.
Best,
David