One Take On One Coach's Twitter Perspective

According to our friends over at CNET and the Technically Incorrect blog, notable non-Twitterer Les Miles at LSU will look to tweet during games this year (maybe, like here at Arkansas where we call those Grunts, they'll be Growls).

We've seen our share of stories about the growing Twitter impact in recruiting, with one of our local newspapers weighing in today as well. They lead with Tennessee's football coach capturing the essense of so much of what happens in college sports:

“I don’t know that it really helps you that much in recruiting. But if it does, we’re trying.”

One of the local bloggers called out our basketball coach, John Pelphrey, for having only three followers while UK coach John Calipari had over 10,000.

I'll clear this one up from our end -- we secured all our head coaches names where available, and a reasonable alternative -- CoachTomCollen comes to mind -- to protect them from imposters until each coach decides how -- and more importantly if -- they may use the system.

So you can't get followers if you aren't active; and it is not fair to dun a coach for low numbers until they have decided how they will incorporate it into their recruiting philosophy.

Plus, as you read through the CNET story, those in the Division I business will quickly pick up some places where I hope CNET simply misquoted or misinterpreted. Twitter can be a minefield, and one must be careful to not let it become a SMS texting work-around.

As far as our main department feed, @ArkRazorbacks, I'm quite pleased that we're about to cross 700 followers who have shared the knowledge of the feed among themselves. There's been some cross promotion, but its a natural phenominan that grows about 30 followers a day.

It's a good tool for the mobile class and the distant fan -- they'd have gotten the first news of Eibner's hit and later his game winning walk. We also use it to refeed our RSS from the web and the video -- a huge item since I really believe a lot of folks were not aware of how much video came out of our site every day (usually two to three new clips in season).