Tuesday, May 03, 2011

But The Revolution Will Be Tweeted

Gil Scott-Heron might have said the revolution will not be televised, but nobody said the military raids would not be Tweeted. A cautionary tale for all my colleagues who believe you can control media access anytime, anywhere -- if the United States Navy SEALs can get their cover busted by citizens, anyone can.

If you missed it in the Osama coverage, two local residents of the neighborhood where the compound was located were inadvertent chroniclers of history.

Sohaib Athar was the more famous of the two, issuing his "helicopters over head" tweet in real time. The Los Angeles Times along with Reuters provide a short blow-by-blow. It's amusing in the sense that he's not knowing what is going on - he just wants them to go away so he can go back to sleep. Later he realizes what he was the witness of, and becomes Warhol-ed for the 21st century: he may not have 15 minutes of fame, but he sure picked up more than 15,000 followers in the next 24 hours.

Actually, Athar's feed is up to almost 100K followers.

So what does it really mean for us in college sports? Do you really think that when your coaches are out at events now everything they say isn't fair game? That when athletes are in public and major things happen, they will not be approached by not just media, but casual fans who will post things they say and do?

Once again, the best strategy is to embrace the glass house you live in. Train your people to accept it.

1 comment:

Chris Syme said...

This incident reminds me that not only do we have to be careful what we do on social media, but remember that others are watching and they're in the space too. Good observations.