By Laura Ulrich
When it comes to communicating about your athletic department, one thing is indisputable—technology has changed the landscape. That technology comes with some big upsides, like being able to quickly and inexpensively connect with fans and alums through Web sites and e-mails. But many athletic directors are also finding there is a downside to the world of new media: While you can use technology to spread your department’s message, others can use it to spin rumors and broadcast reputation-damaging falsehoods.
“The difficulty with many forums like Web sites and blogs is that there is no accountability,” says Mike Thomas, Athletic Director at the University of Cincinnati. “People can say whatever they want about your program. A lot of it is pure fiction, but it’s a powerful medium, and people are paying attention to it and believing what they read. Whether we like it or not, it’s shaping the perception of our program—and that can be extremely frustrating, not just for us, but also for our coaches and student-athletes who become subjects of the online rumor mill.”
At Cincinnati, Thomas and his administrative team have decided to not spend a lot of time following the swirl of Internet communication about their program and instead focus their energy on communicating the facts about Bearcat athletics through mediums they can control. “Most of what we see on other electronic media, we simply don’t respond to,” Thomas says. “We really have no control over what a blogger decides to write, so we do the best job possible with what we can control. We take advantage of our own Web site and other new media to communicate a consistent message about our values and the core mission of our department. We believe if we keep saying, ‘This is who we are and this is what we are about,’ people will be less likely to buy into the fiction they read about us elsewhere.”
At the University of New Mexico, Athletic Director Paul Krebs agrees that broadcasting your department’s message loud and clear is the first step to combating the online rumor mill, but his department has taken things one step further. With help from Sports Media Challenge, a communications consulting firm based in North Carolina, Kreb’s administrative team has begun tracking what’s being said online about UNM athletics. Staff members in athletics communication spend some time every day browsing the most widely read sites and blogs and checking out the content.
“We monitor what’s being written and also try to develop relationships with the people who run the blogs,” Krebs says. “If they are posting false information, rumors, or innuendo, we go online and refute it, or we ask their moderator to correct or remove it. We especially focus on inaccuracies that are very damaging or appearing with some consistency.”
Krebs is quick to point out that monitoring and correcting every rumor on the Internet would be an impossible task, and his team focuses on the biggest sites. “We certainly don’t read or respond to every blog,” he says. “But we’ve decided that these are such powerful forces shaping the perception of our program, and so often the information is simply wrong that it’s important to engage with it to some degree instead of ignoring it.”
Krebs also believes in fighting fire with fire by becoming a blogger himself. “Two to three times a week, I write a blog about a particular event or a point of philosophy for the department,” he says. “We’ve also asked our newly hired Head Men’s Basketball Coach Steve Alford to start a blog as a way of giving people a glimpse into the team’s personality and providing them with a source of consistent, accurate information. We believe the more we take advantage of the new forms of media ourselves, the more our fans will come directly us for their information instead of looking elsewhere.”
For more advice on communicating with coaches, fans, and the media, read the Athletic Management August/September cover story, “Your Turn to Talk.”
Laura Ulrich is an Assistant Editor at Athletic Management.
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