Tweeting in the locker room is now under scrutiny. Athletes, Assistant Coaches, and Management are making their opinions known to the “socialverse”. But who can blame them in this industry of secrecy and non-transparency?

As much as the focus has been on criticizing the players for TWT (tweeting without thinking) what has the PR team done to prevent the behavior? Let me guess, ban all from tweeting and posting. Yea, right. Realistically people are going to be social. You can’t prevent them from doing that. So the next best approach is to train them to use Social Media effectively and responsibly.

Brian Dresher (@bdresher), Marketing Manager for USA Today gives weekly classes to its journalists. Weekly, people. So who is training the NFL? Sure it is easy to throw the players under the bus – I am not giving them any (SMI) Social Media Immunity for not using common sense. But if they are not trained its difficult to continue to blame them.

These athletes and staff members need to know the ins and outs of the Social Media platform they are on. So if there are any of you folks out there please heed this advice.

1. Don’t tweet anything you don’t want on ESPN SportsCenter.
2. Don’t bad mouth the fans, coaches or referees – just not a good idea.
3. Realize this medium is viral. That means that just because you have 100 followers it doesn’t mean 10,000 people won’t know what you just said in the span of a couple of hours.

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