Posts Tagged ‘sports’

Who’s Afraid of the Twitter Bird?

September 5th, 2009 by AV Flox in social media

The National Football League (NFL), which makes more than $4 billion in television revenues annually, is having trouble dealing with social media. Already having reined in its members with rules about how soon before and after a game they can use services like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook, the NFL has now instituted social media guidelines for its fans.

While fans are welcome to post messages about teams and players, they are not to update any kind of play-by-play accounts of games or post extensive footage taken at games.

The reason? According to a statement NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy made to Forbes, “the NFL sells exclusive rights to television networks and radio stations to broadcast the games and posting text or video recaps of each play could undermine the league and its broadcasting partners’ efforts to make money airing the games.”

What happens if you don’t follow the rules? The NFL will get in touch with you and tell you to pull the content. If a user refuses, the league will consider filing a lawsuit. Frightening, isn’t it? The problem is that the NFL doesn’t have property rights over fans’ tweets.

According to Wendy Seltzer, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, fans have the same right guaranteed by the First Amendment to publish accounts of football games, even in play-by-play form, that any news organization.

“Imagine a national or global brand monitoring intense volumes of conversations in real-time (at trending topic speed), which usually averages about 4,000 plus updates per hour,” says Brian Solis in a piece for Social Media Today. “Now picture the NFL attempting to identify offending parties within the noise and in turn, singling them out for official review and potential enforcement. The NFL would essentially need to implement a social media police force, which is impractical and expensive, or it would require the use of turks to perform this process on game days, but still face the burden of justifying action.”

In terms of preventing the spread of video footage, the NFL and its teams could put a clause on the back of game tickets specifying fans are prohibited from using recording equipment in stadiums. It goes without saying that enforcing the rules would be difficult and because the league doesn’t have property rights over the recorded footage, the task of proving that the presence of the footage in social networking sites reduced the value of their broadcasts falls entirely on them.

Licensing is a real issue that many sports organizations are going to have to face as social media becomes more prominent among fans. It’s going to require a careful balance of protecting leagues’ own broadcasting revenue and finding a way to encourage fans to participate in the experience.

This ban is not the way, but it’s something. And in this world, that’s how we learn best: by trial and error.

(And for those of you wondering if I would be this calm about this if the FIFA went draconian on social media, yes, I’m glad soccer moves too fast for me to say anything other than some variation of OMGOMGGOOOOOOL!)

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  • AV Flox writes about web culture; new media’s gradual overthrow of old media; trends in social media; and the complicated entanglements people get themselves into as we venture forth into this new world where, more and more, the analog is colliding with the digital.

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