Social Media Shenanigans – Roundtable Discussion with Collegiate Sports Information Directors

The University of Kansas bans football team from Twitter during the season

“It’s funny, if you pitch it to the media, they’ll talk about how horrible it is.  Two or three years ago social media was horrible because student-athletes were putting dumb things on the Internet.  Well now, it’s horrible because people are saying mean things to them.  They’re trying to get student-athletes off of it...even if you try to shut them down, they can’t, we’re all too addicted to social media, we can’t stop using it.”  

 It was the words of Kevin DeShazo, a social media expert on training collegiate athletes on how to use social media platforms effectively, and it was a valid point.  In the past ten years since the internet gave birth to Facebook, social media use has skyrocketed, paving the way for one successful social media company after another to earn a fortune with services offering everything from photo and link sharing to chat messaging and miniaturized video entertainment.  Checking or updating social media has become routine for many, no less ingrained in their daily activity as drinking a cup of coffee each morning.  Within that rise, student-athletes have flocked to these tools, proudly sharing their day-to-day routines and team allegiances to the masses.  DeShazo’s infographic is telling; cultivated from surveys and data from collegiate athletes around the country, it paints a clear picture of just how engrained these tools are in a typical student-athlete’s life.

http://www.fieldhousemedia.net/blog/social-media-use-of-student-athletes-infographic

But whose responsibility is it to oversee these accounts while the media circle like vultures around the online feeding ground looking for any missteps or breaking news?  Who is tasked with supervising student-athletes on building positive representations of themselves and the universities they play for while they're constantly online?  For many schools that job falls in the hands of the athletic department administration.  “The sports information directors, those are the people I feel the worse for,” DeShazo stressed, “being an SID is overwhelming enough and then you add all these new responsibilities to it, it’s a different game.  They were just told to be the social media person because they had a Twitter account and so they’re the ones kind of in charge, and they’re overwhelmed…it was one thing when it was just Facebook, but now it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Vine, Snapchat, and all these other platforms almost overnight.”

I started to wonder what it's like for these sports information directors and associate athlete directors, heralded with new responsibilities in an office already moving constant communications out the door from game recaps and event schedules to press releases and media interviews, now assigned to managing news outlets eager for information while coaching their athletes on appropriate university standards online.  So I started calling around to hear what the job is like these days, what the strategies are for social media education, and how schools are managing this constantly evolving scene both at the institution level and via the actions of its 18-22 year old athletes.  A white paper detailing strategies for higher learning institutions on how to handle student-athlete social media education is in the works.  In the meantime, here’s a little of what I heard.

On Operating in a Digital World…“The number one thing that it’s done is we now operate in a 24-hour news cycle.  As recently as just a few years ago we could hold off stories, we could give them to newspapers to run for tomorrow morning’s paper if we had a breaking story, that’s just not the case anymore.  If I tried to give something of a breaking nature to the newspaper and asked them to hold it they’d laugh at me.”  - Assistant Athletics Director Mike Flynn, Appalachian State University 

On Adjusting the Department’s Role….“I think social media is great for institutions and it certainly has changed the way we work.  Even in 2010 we were doing nothing with social media, except on occasion we might put out on Twitter if a kid set a record or something like that.  To where in 2013, I had six to seven people dedicated to social media at each home football game.  So it certainly has had a drastic change in how we do our job.”  - Sports Information Director, Steve Shutt, Wake Forest University

On Sharing Social Media Responsibilities…“We try to keep an eye on our kids on social media, we don’t have anybody; we’re a two and a half person shop right now.  Basically our view on social media with our athletes is we try to put a lot of the responsibility with our students.  At the start of every season we’ll give the speech about social media responsibility and we’ll try and go in the summer and see what’s out there and review and revisit everything we’re teaching.  Basically our policy is we let the kids regulate themselves, however if we see something that is unacceptable we’ll come in and we’ll take care of it.”  - Sports Information Director Matt Turk, California State University Bakersfield

On Student-Athlete Education vs. Social Media Policies...“We did not feel that it was the right thing to do to create a policy.  It didn’t make any sense to have a subset of the student body be held to a policy when their classmates, that don’t happen to be athletes, are under no such policy.  So not having a policy kind of led us to our next avenue, taking the approach of education and trying to make the student-athletes aware of what’s out there and best practices.  We created a teaching tool, a presentation we give, and we engage with our athletes, we want them to follow the official accounts for their sports, and we can follow them back and offer assistance and guidance if a red flag goes up.”   - Assistant Director of Athletics Art Chase, Duke University

On the Bigger Social Media Picture…“I focus more on teaching the understanding that you’re now part of a bigger brand.  When you signed on to play here, you signed up to be a Colorado Buffalo…it’s about understanding that you’re more than just yourself.  We try not to make it a ‘you can’t do this, and you can’t do that’ because I think they kind of shut off when you do that.  It’s also really rewarding for me that we have some really good cases by the time they’re juniors or seniors of a couple kids really getting it and understanding it and having really good examples for us to show all the new kids coming in.”  - Associate Sports Information Director, Curtis Snyder, University of Colorado Boulder