Sports and Twitter
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/the_bonus/06/05/twitter.sports/index.html
Twitter has taken over the sports industry. Today coaches, players, organizations and leagues alike are communicating information to eager fans via this social networking tool. No longer do fans need to rely strictly on the media to provide news about their favorite athletes and teams. Fans get to hear directly from the athletes themselves if they follow them on Twitter. This “satisfies fans’ thirst for a closer connection to big-time athletes.” Twitter clearly allows athletes to share information that may be considered inappropriate if shared through other forms of media, e.g. a newspaper interview or a teleconference. The site “peels back the curtain on an athlete’s existence, showcasing personality layers never seen at press conferences.” Another benefit that athletes enjoy on Twitter is their ability to “speak on their own terms,” meaning that they can clear up something that the media may have spun for publicity reasons. Athletes and coaches must feel to some extent overwhelmed when a swarm of fans approaches them to seek answers to personal questions. Twitter enables these questions to be answered, but the athletes can provide answers from their home instead of in person. Twitter has become so popular in the sports industry, that one league, the NBA, “has a greater audience than all brand accounts besides Whole Foods and online shoe retailer Zappos.”
Really Twitter is all about networking with friends and acquaintances and getting your name out there. Twitter brings people closer, and if one looks at it from a graph theory perspective, it is clear that the site builds relationships between people in a social web, facilitating the formation of strong and weak ties between millions of users across the globe. It is interesting to see how athletes interact with people they have never met before. It is common for an athlete, or for that matter a celebrity in any industry, to directly respond to a particular fan’s inquiry. Before Twitter was founded, what other way did fans have to communicate directly with their role models? Sure they could talk to them in person if they were lucky enough to sit courtside at a game or run into them at a charity event, etc. And it is pretty rare for a fan to communicate with an athlete via phone, text or email. Twitter provides a simple-to-use social networking tool that makes athletes and fans everywhere happy.