Two college athletes walk into a bar.
No, that’s not the start of a joke. It’s the beginning of a potential problem for the athletes, you and your program.
The problem is that everyone else in the bar has a camera in their pocket. The next thing you know a photo appears on Twitter of Snapchat.
Maybe a few of your players, who happen to be below the legal drinking age, are hanging out at a party. Red Solo cups are everywhere. Now the party-goers have switched their phones to video.
Maybe one of your athletes is at home engaged in a Twitter dispute with a troll. Types the wrong thing. Now it’s trending. That’s a problem.
Or, let’s say you’re Michael Phelps and it’s three months after you won more gold medals that any Olympian in history. You’re at a house in Columbia, S.C., with six other people. The next day, your picture is plastered on tabloids with a bong.
“We live, almost, in a transparent world today,” David Ablauf, Michigan’s associate athletic director said in an article in the Indy Star about the impact Social Media is having on college sports. “Every person that you walk by has the potential to be a reporter.”
Would you want to know about these things if they happened to your team? Of course, in many cases, you would be finding out about the issue at the same time as thousands of others. And they will be trying to exaggerate the problem, not make it go away.
An article on ESPN.com points out that, “It’s a whole new world for coaches and athletic department staffs who previously only worried about what sports reporters had to say. The popularity of fan-generated content, which reports every rumor — accurate or not — is a beast few collegiate programs are equipped to handle.”
Media training is an increasingly popular method of helping athletes understand and prepare for life in the public eye. But not every program can afford media consultants to work with their teams.
The alternative for most is the old saying, “If you wouldn’t say it in front of your mother, don’t say it at all.”
It’s difficult and time-consuming for a coach to monitor all the social media accounts of every player on their team to see if they said anything their moms wouldn’t like. But DRIVN has a solution.
Coaches have the option of monitoring the social media activity of their players. Coaches or the whole staff can get all of it fed into the Chat feature. If they don’t want to get every player’s activity, they can choose to monitor a selected few of their more, let’s say, outspoken players.
Why should you? An article on Forbes.com calls social media the “Virtual Sports Bar that fans flock to before, during and after the games.”
The article goes on to explain that, “The behavior of a team or an athlete on Social Media can directly influence a fan’s perception of that team or athlete.”
By keeping up with your athletes’ social media activity, you can help them understand how to use it for more helpful ways – like increasing the number of fans you get at home games, or how many people watch your games online, or improve the overall perception of the program.
“There is real concern about the implication of these sites, but at the same time, appreciation for word-of-mouth marketing,” Kathleen Hessert, president of Sports Media Challenge, told ESPN.com. “These sites can create advocates and evangelists of their brand.”
At the very least, monitoring your athletes’ social media can lead to a conversation of the pitfalls involved with being a public figure. If nothing else, it can help your players understand that they are never really alone, things they say are never really private, and there are people who aren’t really concerned with facts or accuracy.