There a lot of athletes that is using Twitter and other social media platforms to extend their public appearance. Fans can with help of twitter follow their idols and heroes in their everyday activities. On the other side many sport organizations behind major professional sport leagues have a desire to understand how social media works and use the tools to market their brand. However social media can also be a treat to athletes, coaches, staff members and media commentators, because the fact is that you can’t really control all the messages that are posted on a medium like Twitter. The fear of losing control over the messages is driving organizations to have strict social media policies.

There is no doubt that top athletes all over the world are taking advantage of the opportunity to directly talk to their fans via Twitter and other social media tools. Plenty of sport stars have control over their own twitter profiles, autonomous of their teams, and are marketing their own brand for great business possibilities in the future.

The positive effects of this are that sport stars are interacting with their fans more than ever before. They are tweeting about what they are doing, answering questions, and post web casts, and using social media as a tool for strategic communication. The bad side is that it can be very dangerous for the athletes if they tweet about wrong things that can hurt them.

The recent growth of the Social Web has for sure contributed to some radical changes in the sport media industry. Today many sport media organizations use twitter to report the latest news, before they publish their articles. As a way to inform the fans what they can read about in the next issue. It is also easier for sport journalists to follow the athletes and collect material for stories and articles.

Yet there are many sport organizations that are terrified of the social media, for example US Open and NFL have restricted their sport stars, coaches and agents to write posts on social media forums. Another good example is the American sport network ESPN, which has created a twitter policy that prohibits their employees to discuss sport events via social media. They are not allowed to create their own profiles and blogs that contain sport material. The company thinks that it can hurt the brand, if they let their employees have an open access to twitter. Of course if they tweet about something stupid, it can be negative, but overall I think that Social media will just benefit the company, especially if they combine their tweets with future broadcasts.

I personally think that Social Media offers great opportunities for the sport industry and that the social media tools are beneficial for both the fans and the TV networks, yet today it seems that sport organizations are too afraid to use social media. Maybe they are not educated enough about all the huge opportunities that twitter offers. Social media is a great compliment to sports, because you have the possibility to engage fans like never before.