ESPN drops the hammer on Twitter usage
Another day, another example of businesses becoming disillusioned with Twitter as a tool for open communication.
The first salvo was fired by ESPN, which announced a new "twitter policy" for its employees. If you are a fan of the sports network, you know that virtually every on and off-air personality now has a twitter account, from Bill Simmons to Mike and Mike to even the PTI guys.
Well, don't expect them to be talking about pop culture references any more. The new ESPN twitter policy dictates that the use of twitter by employees is only for talking about ESPN. Ironically, news of thise policy was tweeted by Ric Bucher on (wait for it) his twitter account.
No fan of what Twitter has become, I personally think this policy is ridiculous. While I can appreciate the need for some sort of policy for social media usage within your business, ESPN is going about this the wrong way. Tweeting that toes the company line, on its own, is a recipe for boredom and dis-interest.
At that point, why not just set up a Twitter account to dump excerpts from your blog. Wait, ESPN already does that.
If I were an ESPN personality, I'd seriously reconsider tweeting if the content is going to be dictated in such a fashion.
The other big twitter story today was that of San Diego Chargers cornerback Antonio Cromartie being fined by the team for comments left on his private Twitter account. Re-read that - his private Twitter account. What did Cromartie say on twitter to earn him a fat $2500 fine from the Chargers? He said, more or less, that the food in their football camp stunk.
Chargers coach Norv Turner said that he felt that comments like the ones Cromartie made were best kept in-house. "We're trying to be open and give the fans a look at what we're doing, but certainly we're not going to go out of our way to give our opponents a competitive advantage or give them something that we feel should stay in our building," Turner said "So that's been our approach with any forms of media that we're involved with."
So, now one man's opinion that your professional football franchise is serving bad cafeteria food is a trade secret?
How long will it be before other teams adopt a similar no-tolerance policy for tweeting? Will fines ultimately make the prospect of using sites like Twitter or Facebook a second thought?
Comments
i just can't see how ESPN can enforce this. are they going to monitor their employees' blogs and facebook pages, too? i suppose they can fire someone for saying something negative about ESPN or blogging about their weekend drug use (i'm not saying anyone at ESPN has a bad habit, it's just an example). those things reflect negatively on ESPN; but tweeting that you just dropped your 5 year old off at their first day of kindergarten is beyond the reach of ESPN. Ironically, i saw on CNN today that the Pentagon is now reviewing is SNS policy. The Marines are banned from facebook, while the Army encourages SNS use.
Well, they can enforce it if they think it is a big enough issue. Apparently, some of the folks there do a lot of reporting through Twitter, and perhaps the network would rather that content exist on their own web site? I am sure it all has something to do with money, etc.
I guess my question would be: Are these actual personal accounts for the ESPN employees or did ESPN have them get them as channel personalities? I can imagine them being able to regulate the tweets if the latter is the case. But if the former is the case, the best I could imagine for ESPN is that they have clauses in their contracts that state the employee shouldn't say/do anything that reflects badly on the company.
I can understand the Marine Corps banning Twitter from a national security standpoint (some folks will tweet about anything). However, reviews of training camp grub are not that sensitive and would not be considered "bulletin board material" for opponents. The bigger question here is free speech. Is the line drawn by employers at social media, or does this eventually snowball into conversations with friends and spouses? You should have a right to say whatever you want about your employer. Granted, your comments may be career suicide. Will we all become covert agents of some sort even though we work at McDonald's? (Can't divulge the cook time on those fries. Can't say what you found in the bathroom trash.) Spooky!
ultimately, we should be asking ourselves why we even need twitter? seriously.
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