Social media has a place in the sports world

Social media is an ever-evolving enigma—everyone now knows that there are tons of opportunities within the online space to make money, gain publicity, and tell the world about oneself, but few people can figure out how to maximize that payoff.

Athletes and sports programs are constantly experimenting with the usefulness of social media. Many pro athletes have their own Twitter streams or Facebook fan pages, but only a few have figured out how to capture the ever-elusive money-maker of social media: fan engagement.

Once the fans become invested in you, you’ve created an audience. You’ve got a captive audience that wants to know what you’re doing that’s cool and different. It reflects a trans-national trend in freedom of information—the economy is becoming more transparent.

However, people are scared to engage fully with their audiences on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, because word of mouth is completely organic—if your fans love you or if they hate you, they make it public information. This instant feedback mechanism is an opportunity for any brand to grow and become more responsive to the market, but it’s also threatening, which is why professional sports leagues have adopted policies limiting what athletes say to the public.

But be not afraid! For those meek-but-intrigued social media newbies, here are some creative ways in which the Internet is changing the way fans keep up on their favorite sports.

1. Sports reporters on Twitter. My favorites—ESPN’s online columnist Bill Simmons, who is @sportsguy33, and Jay Christensen, the Wiz of Odds, who is at @JayChristensen—cover two opposite ends of the Twitter spectrum. Bill has cultivated an online celebrity persona, interacting frequently with his fans on Twitter and using his feed to pimp his ESPN.com articles on occasion. Simmons is a huge asset to ESPN’s online readership because he drives traffic to the site but also serves as an approachable face to the big, national brand name. Jay, on the other hand, uses his Twitter feed much like a micro-news aggregator, writing his Reporters’ Notebooks features, which summarize relevant collegiate athletics news around the nation, and linking to them from his blog. It’s thanks to Jay that I first heard about the rumors of Colorado leaving the Big 12. People like Jay and Bill are keeping the sports media world moving at the speedy pace that social media is taking, and their work helps to make journalism more timely and more relevant.

2. Interactive Facebook fan pages. The fan page for the NBA, at www.facebook.com/nba, harnesses the viral capabilities of its nearly two million fans by engaging them in asking for feedback every single day. Posting at least two updates per weekday, and more on the weekend, the NBA is constantly adding links to epic slam dunks on YouTube or running polls asking fans about specific players. The coolest thing about this use of a fan page is that it unites fans from every team, offering up content about all the games each week so that there are opportunities for fans from Denver to play nicely with fans from Detroit and for all fans to weigh in on the best defender in NBA history. In addition, the NBA gets that the best way to have happy fans is to make it worth their while—the Facebook page features giveaways of Xbox consoles as well as opportunities to download cool wallpapers to your iPhone or your Blackberry. I don’t even watch NBA games and I wanted to be a fan—the NBA cares about its community, and takes care to delivery quality, useful content to sports fans. No wonder it gets almost two million thumbs-up.

3. Athletes themselves engaging with fans on Twitter. The obvious example of this is Mister Ochocinco himself, @ogochocinco, who boasts an impressive 773,509 Twitter followers as of press time. There is absolutely nothing professional about this Twitter feed. There is random usage of capitalization. There are incomplete sentences. Chad does not even make an effort to be politically correct or self-censored in the kinds of things that he posts. Yet, we eat it up—fans love it because it’s authentic, real, and not manufactured, sanitized PR lingo like so much of the material that professional and collegiate teams put out. If someone else ran his Twitter, would we ever have learned that Ochocinco is an Alvin Ailey Dance fan?

Transparency is scary. It means that if somebody is going to call you on your shit, the entire world gets to see it. Long gone are the days of the private and personal “angry letter.” But I see it as progressive—athletic departments can’t hide behind desks in their offices, and pro teams can’t hide behind managers and owners, making the experience more valuable for the fans. And at the end of the day, isn’t that really what sports are all about?

Lisa Lewis is a Barnard College senior majoring in economics.