The folks at Twitter should all be sending flowers and thank you's to everyone at sports leagues and media companies today, as no one did more to grow the Twitter brand and create watercooler talk this side of Ashton Kutcher than the media yesterday. First it was the NFL teams and their great debate over where and how blogging and twitter postings can be done by players and the media…good piece by Bob Kravitz in USA Today on the issue…and then the day long debate over ESPN's new policy (great summary by SBJ's John Ourand) and the responses by Sports Illustrated, Fox Sports etc… What it comes down to is the same issue that has been debated in various forms for years…message control. If you are an NFL team you want to be able to have as much control over the message being given to the public as possible…if you are a brand or a media company you want to make sure that those on your payroll are being able to grow your brand by using the best means possible to the company. At the end of the day those are where the money is made for the brand and that's where you want fans to go for credible information. The 24/7 world we live in today creates many more distractions than ever before, deciding what is a credible source with the right information is the challenge whether it is politics, civil defense, healthcare or sports and entertainment media. What is even more interesting with regard to social media is the Wired Magazine piece on the Marines banning social media platforms, showing that the space can effectively create confusion and the spread of misinformation in life and death situations. Now is the Twitter in sports debate any different from when the crisis for teams was sports radio, or college newspapers, or tabloid. No. In the end policies for credible coverage using these media will be set, and we will move on to the next issue. It remains more concerning that journalistic standards,,,and jobs…continue to disappear as media entities struggle to find profit centers that mix social media with the traditional. End of the day social media alone still does not generate a business…but it does create buzz and lots of distractions, both good and bad.
