Macro Monday! Twitter and Sports.

I tried to avoid this post as long as possible, but now that Oprah is twitter it is inevitable.

For readers who may not know Twitter is a micro-blogging service that has taken over the Internet. A lot of people I talk to “don’t get it”, or are wary of a service that would seem to facilitate constant narcissism. I understand those arguments, there are plenty of people on Twitter who post things like, “I went to the store today”, or “i’m taking a poop”.

However, for every one of those people there are hundreds of thousands of others who are using Twitter as an extremely effective marketing tool. Moreover, the fact that you can search all of Twitter gives you real time feedback on any product, idea, or thought. While I understand Twitter’s marketing potential, it is interesting to think about how this will translate to sports.

Many athletes are on Twitter already. The most well known user is Shaq. For a complete list of well known athletes on twitter, check out SportsFanLive.com’s recently released “athletetweets“. This service is a real time aggregation of athlete tweets (as the name implies). So what are the implications of athletes controlling their own PR, sharing elements of their personal lives?

1) There is a new arena for athletes, owners, or coaches to critique their leagues and find repercussions:

Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks was fined for being critical of referees on Twitter. I feel like it won’t be long before an Athlete tweets something that a major sports league will not appreciate.

2) Twitter allows people to feel like they “know” athletes, coaches, and owners.

Shaq has over 725,000 followers on Twitter, why is this smart? Well, he can only play basketball for so much longer. He is branding himself as a tech savy funny man who will be extremely employable after he retires from basketball.  This feeling translates into a new found affection for an athlete, and adds a new kind of humanity to the athlete. It is the ultimate “he’s just like us!” kind of PR. This recognition of similarity translates into the public seeing athletes as more than overpaid physical specimens whose only job in life is to entertain us. Ultimately, this may lead to a greater accountability on the part of the major sports to care for these athletes that the social media using public has a new found affinity for, not just as athletes, but as human beings. If I was the head of the NFLPA for example, I would be on twitter constantly, garnering public support for what is widely regarded as the weakest players association of the professional major sports.

3) Twitter is going to challenge they way the casual fan follows sports:

I have realized this week that receiving twitter updates rather than watching the pitch by pitch game cast on MLB.com is infinitely easier– There is less, what the casual sports fan may consider frivolous, information and the live game tweets can be both informative, smart, and humorous. If fans are unable to watch the game, they want to know when something major happens. Most do not care if the third pitch in the fourth inning was a split seemed fast ball that was thrown at 88 MPH.

Twitter will be especially powerful for live football games, as touchdown and big play updates may satiate the casual fan. Soccer is also perfect for twitter, as goals happen very infrequently. Basketball may be the hardest sport to tweet, but it can still be done, and for the casual fan who cannot watch the game, it would probably get the job done.

Twitter is essentially texting your friend and asking for the score of the game, but you don’t have to send the text message in the first place. It is on your phone, presumably tweeted by a super-fan, team expert, friend at the game, or maybe even an athlete, coach or owner.

Twitter is making the sports world much more open and interactive. Soon however, athletes, leagues, coaches and others will realize the power of twitter to control their public image and brand themselves effectively. Twitter is a powerful way to connect people and market both individuals and products, and it just may change the way we look at sports figures and follow sports.

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More from this author

• Friday Fiend! NBA Playoffs and A Weekend Jam
• Milton Bradley Says He’s Ready, Unfased By Racist Cubs Fans
• Tuesday Tickle! Condoleeza Rice is a Sports Blogger, and Supports Racist Golfers?