How Can You Keep Up?

More small chunks of thought going into the CoSIDA presentation:

Community is the essence of Web 2.0, and the same applies to monitoring. Building your athletic department’s community starts with trust. While there are legal limits even in a public institution, the more information that is shared the better educated both the monitors and the fans will be toward the athletic department. The insider group is a prime example. Not only can they share and support the message of the department, they can watch and listen for problems, particularly with the fan base. Tap into the sport staff. At most schools, the coaching staff is charged with monitoring the social networking activity of student-athletes. There is no need to duplicate that function within the media relations office as long as there is trust that the coaching staff will alert the SIDs. Here’s a hint for the coach: there’s no such thing as you caught that Facebook post in time. Poor Andy Robinson at University of Buffalo found that out the hard way. Same can be said right at home when Patrick Beverly made a wall post that he was thinking about leaving Arkansas.

The key is distributed monitoring. No single person can keep up with every sport at your school, but as a part of the individual sport contact’s duties they can monitor what’s happening within that sport. This is more than checking the local boards that follow the institution. Encourage them to know where the national and regional boards are about their sport. Frankly, the less visible the sport the more important these communities are to the participants. Everyone wants media coverage, and absent traditional brick-and-mortar sportswriters the vacuum will be filled by pro-ams.