A Reminder To Athletes About How Twitter Works
Imagine you had a dirty joke that you like telling in familiar company. This joke you’re imagining is filthy. Heinous. The kind of joke that demands you hunch your shoulders and lean in close to the people you tell it to. Handled properly, there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with these jokes (although there might be something wrong with you for thinking they’re funny), but their relative harmlessness doesn’t mean you’d want to tell this joke over a bullhorn to a group of randomly gathered strangers either.
See? Celtic swingman Marquis Daniels doesn’t get that.
ESPN’s True Hoop blogger, Henry Abbott, posted about the following tweet written by Daniels:
[Sic'd] “Any body got a rednose pit dat u wana breed wit my Orlando raised brown eyed Doberman I have her tail n ears clipped…she’s a prize fighter.”
Abbott goes on to dispel the notion that Daniels is involved in any kind of dog fighting scheme. This isn’t a post about dog fighting. It’s a post about foolish statements being made on a grand scale. Or maybe this is just a post about social media being Grand Scale.
Abbott touches on the idea that athletes need to be more careful on media like Twitter or UStream, but he doesn’t explain why. After all, when the discussions started about Daniels’ tweet, he suddenly set his account to private. Problem solved.
Firstly, Daniels still has his followers, about 1,400 of them before he privatized his account. They all still have access to whatever he says. And if he says anything that the public might take any interest in, Daniels is just an e-mailed screen capture away from hot water all over again. But none of this is news. President Obama calling Kanye West a jackass off the record, only to have it tweeted back on the record – THAT’s news.
But back to that joke analogy from a minute ago … three minutes ago, you say? Well, you’re a slow reader, aren’t you? There are exercises you can do to improve your read speed. See me after the blog.
Most of us wouldn’t dare tell some blue joke in a mixed crowd of different types. There would be too many people to offend. Too much risk of hitting a nerve or sounding uglier than we care to.
Twitter is the bullhorn and when you’re in front of that bullhorn, speakers either understand its power or they crumble underneath it. Marquis Daniels isn’t a superstar, but he’s popular enough that 1,400 people care what he has to say. Lance Armstrong has over 2.014 million followers. That’s only 66,000 fewer readers than the Wall Street Journal.
Think about that. The WSJ is the second most circulated newspaper in the country. Armstrong’s tweets reach as many people as the major newspapers in Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Denver and Dallas combined. A newspaper’s circulation doesn’t track what particular information a person sees within that paper, what articles or sections they flip through or scour, etc. Armstrong’s 2 million followers sought his profile and subscribed to specifically his feed. What one person says in a newspaper may very well be overlooked by the paper’s subscribers. What Armstrong says in his tweets will not be overlooked by his followers.
Lamar Odom? 124,000 followers. That’s roughly the same circulation as New Jersey’s Asbury Park Press. Chad Ochocinco? 183,000. Similar to Little Rock’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Terrell Owens. 197,000 followers. He reaches over 2,000 more people than either the Columbus (OH) Dispatch or the South Florida Sun-Sentinal. Serena Williams? 1.136 million followers. That’s the New York Times plus the Oakland Tribune. Shaquille O’Neal? 2.297 million followers. That’s both USA Today and the Albuquerque Journal.
None of these athletes would blab their Twitter utterings to a reporter at any of these newspapers. Yet here a tweet, there a tweet, everywhere a tweet-tweet.
But don’t stop on our account. For sportswriters and fans alike, the athlete Twitter phenomenon is kinda awesome in the same way watching a drunk punch himself is kinda awesome. We’ll gawk as long as it lasts, but we’re fully aware that many of these situations end suddenly and unpleasantly.
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Photos courtesy of Flickr
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