When Will Athletes Start Tweeting from the Sidelines?
Imagine the scene: the Patriots have a 21-17 lead with just over three minutes left on the clock in a late-November game at the Meadowlands. The Jets have a third-and-six at their own 38-yard line as Mark Sanchez goes to the shotgun with a single back and trips right, with the Pats cheating left and prepared to blitz Sanchez’ blind side before he can get the ball out.
As any fan does, you’re not only watching the game on TV, you’re also following it online, where you have your fantasy matchups on one monitor and Twitter open on the other, just in case there’s any insight that you might not be getting from the TV guys.
Sanchez barks out signals, each of which can be heard clearly over the silence of the nearly 100,000 fans. The Patriots shift at the line, and Jerod Mayo calls out of the blitz when he senses a screen.
You take a swig of your beer, hoping that whatever’s about to happen doesn’t cause you to spit it out.
As the ball is snapped, your timeline refreshes and you see something you weren’t prepared for: a tweet from Chad Ochocinco, who’s very much active and in uniform, and very much on the sideline at this game.
Sanchez barely makes it to his fifth step before a charging Patrick Chung sends him to the ground, forcing a fumble which Mayo recovers and returns for a touchdown. The Patriots tack on one more touchdown as Devin McCourty is the beneficiary of a pick-six tossed up by Sanchez, and win the game, 35-17.
But the highlight, not surprisingly, involved Ochocinco.
“Everybody wants special and inside treatment, so content from the dugout or the sidelines or in the locker room is valuable,” says Lou Imbriano, founder of TrinityONE and former VP of Marketing for the Patriots, and owner of four Super Bowl rings himself. “Teams should find a way to monetize that content, to get that content out to consumers to make them feel connected.”
It may be a bit unrealistic to expect Ocho to be the one to break the barrier, and according to Imbriano, a baseball player is more likely to tweet from the dugout than any football player ever would be from the sideline.
“Let’s say a Sox player is in the dugout and there’s a new cap coming out, and they say they want to turn it into a rally-cap and if you want to buy it, you can click here,” Imbriano continued.
Of course, there are regulations in place that keep players from tweeting from a certain time before the games start until after postgame press conferences end. But those regulations can only last so long, Imbriano notes.
“The players need to do something for the players, and the League needs to do something for the League, and they need to come up with a strategy that takes everybody’s goals into account and create a plan that achieves all those goals,” he continued, reminding that it doesn’t need to be a PR nightmare, because anything players say in a press conference will spread just as quickly as what they say in a tweet will.
Tweeting from the sidelines or from the dugout isn’t something that’s going to reveal strategy, it’s not something that players will use to talk trash – we learned from Kevin Garnett and Charlie Villanueva that that stays on the playing field. But it is something that will further engage fans and consumers of the product, which is what teams and leagues should be after.
Sure, social media on the sidelines could be a distraction. Sure, it could be a legal issue for leagues. But assuming no legal ramifications, assuming that players are entrusted to send out a few tweets here and there, it’s hard to see a way in which supplementing traditional coverage with an in-game approach wouldn’t take off.
“There’s enough engagement that everyone can get a piece,” Imbriano concluded, reminding me that they aren’t called teams for no reason at all. “They need to find out how they’re more powerful together than alone.”