Today is a landmark day for social media, but for all the wrong reasons. Earlier we learned that the United States Marines have banned social media sites on their network, and now we're discovering that ESPN might have just dropped "the hammer" when it comes to employee tweeting.
In a tweet that may or may not defy the new ESPN policy, an NBA analyst for ESPN, Ric Bucher, said that the big-time sports broadcasting network is "prohibiting tweeting info unless it serves ESPN."
We got wind of ESPN's foul-worthy activity through an NPR post on the subject. Although Butcher's tweet doesn't give us the full scoop on ESPN's policy, it would appear that the network is showing poor judgment and exposing to the world the fact that they have no idea that social media is all about relationship building.
We know that many ESPN analysts, show hosts, personalities, and guests are all tweeting. As someone who watches the network quite frequently, I can attest to watching them grapple with Twitter over time, their hosts struggling to understand why athletes tweet, and finally embracing it for themselves with frequent on-air mentions and show tie-ins. It's a progression of sorts that may stop dead in its tracks, and turn into one giant ego feed, if there's truth to Bucher's tweets.
Community and social media expert Chris Brogan says it best when he writes, "You can use your robot feeds to blurt out posts and showtimes and stuff, but if you want connectivity to people, engagement to your content, and a sense of participation on the social web, making people only talk about ESPN is a quick one-way ticket to who cares?"
ESPN, if you want your viewers to care about you, your shows, and your on-air personalities, then you need to empower your employees to care back, to tweet like humans instead of robots, and use your very powerful platform for conversation. Clearly, you've yet to take a deep look at the What the F**k is Social Media deck. There's a lot of lessons in there that you need to learn and apply right now.