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Twitter is simple in concept, yet diverse in its execution offerings. The site asks people to answer the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less. Some users take this quite literally and produce a stream of posts detailing each happening of their day, but as some athletic departments have learned, it is an effective tool for informing the public, generating attention, and engaging fans.

And now athletic administrators can use it to keep up on interesting and useful developments affecting their profession since Athletic Management is now on Twitter under the name AthleticMgmt. Become a follower of AthleticMgmt and read our tweets pointing out items of interest to athletic administrators at the high school and college levels.

All of this may sound a little strange, but it's really pretty simple. Tweets are the short messages that users post to their site. By choosing to follow a user, their tweets will appear on your site as well. The site also offers the ability to send direct messages to individual followers and to control who can follow you. Accounts are free and you can sign up for as many accounts as you have e-mail addresses--so you can have one account that serves the department as a whole and other accounts for individual coaches or administrators.

But how do you find the right people to follow? The simplest way is to use Twitter's search features, starting with the "Find People" link at the top of the main page. You can search by a person's real name or user name. Since user names often reflect a specific interest, you can also search for phrases related to specific topics, such as "bball" or "NCAA," although results can be very hit or miss.

You can also search Tweets to find posts of interest. Use the search box on the right side of the main page or go to search.twitter.com and enter a term you want to search for ("basketball," for example). You will then see the most recent posts with your search term. You can then click on the user's name to see if they would be some you're interested in following.

Once you find someone you feel is worth following, you can also find out who they are following and who is following them, which is accessible by clicking on the "Followers" and "Following" links on the right side of a user's page. Although going through a screen of users can be somewhat cumbersome, there will often be enough shared interests among followers to find others you want to follow. There are also outside Web sites you can use to help identify users you might be interested in following.

Other Twitter add-ons offer different ways to view tweets and facilitate its use with specific mobile devices. The 140 character limit is designed to make tweets easily read through cell phones and other mobile devices, but many Twitter users prefer to access the service through the Web instead.

For many athletic departments, Twitter's potential to quickly spread news amongst a wide group of followers is its greatest asset. The University of Arkansas, for example, has posted more than 1,200 tweets, which they have renamed grunts, since the beginning of April. Most are short updates from games while others include a link to a story on the Razorbacks Web site, which itself includes links back to the department's Twitter page.

In addition to the ability to quickly disseminate information, Twitter can be used to reach fans directly. Numerous coaches have hopped on the Twitter bandwagon. Indiana University Head Men's Basketball Coach Tom Crean and University of Kentucky Head Men's Basketball John Calipari even have a friendly contest to see who can get the most followers.

Louisiana State University Head Football Coach Les Miles, meanwhile, says he plans on Twittering during games this fall. He also says Twitter can be a great recruiting tool.

"Absolutely, it's for recruiting purposes," Miles told USA Today. "It allows us to communicate, to those people that subscribe, blasts of information. ... It's also an opportunity for those prospects that subscribe to communicate to us."

So far the NCAA has done little to dictate how coaches can and cannot use Twitter, saying that although rules governing public comments about recruits apply regardless of the medium, there's nothing inherent to Twitter that violates any NCAA rules.

"We view Twitter as a blog," NCAA spokesperson Cameron Schuh told ESPN The Magazine. "As long as coaches are on there talking about what they're doing with their day and how their practice went or things like that ... not getting into specific terms, that's fine. They can't talk about a person they're recruiting, or they can't use it to talk about their whereabouts on a recruiting trip."

Still, some schools are taking proactive steps to try to avoid crossing into any gray areas. In part because of the difficulty of determining exactly who is behind a Twitter account, Crean does not follow anyone else on Twitter. The University of Oklahoma has information on its Web site reminding fans and boosters of the NCAA rules governing the use of social networking sites, including Twitter, in the recruiting process.

But some programs have already experienced Twitter problems. The University of Tennessee reported a secondary violation to the NCAA after a new staffer named a specific recruit in a tweet that was posted for a short time on Head Football Coach Lane Kiffin's page. And Calipari inadvertently sent a request for a transfer release form on his Twitter account. Although posts can be deleted, as these quickly were, it's obvious that once a post is out there, it's impossible to control where it ends up.

With Twitter still in its growing stages, there's no way to know what the future holds for the service. But sports media expert Kathleen Hessert, who is responsible for getting NBA star Shaquille O'Neal and IndyCar driver Danica Patrick on Twitter, is vocal in her belief that college athletic departments need to take advantage of this new technology. She even presented a Webinar for the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA) on Twitter.

"Twitter is something you ignore at your own peril,'' Hessert told Newsday. "Athletes, teams and leagues are nuts not to explore it. They risk becoming irrelevant, especially to young people.''

Dennis Read is an Associate Editor at Athletic Management.