College Football 2012: Monitoring Social Media a Necessary Evil in College Sport

Today the New York Times' Pete Thamel put out a great piece on the battle to monitor social media in the collegiate athletic landscape. Thamel hit on some of the companies that offer the monitoring service, touched on the schools that work with the companies and hit the different views of the services. Thamel also briefly discussed the bill Senator Ron Young from Maryland is pushing to limit how in depth universities can go into their student-athletes' social media accounts.

We'll start off with Young's bill before getting into the crux of why these monitoring services are a positive for universities and student-athletes. Young's bill, in the same vein as the push to eliminate employers from accessing password protected information, is meant to protect athletes' privacy.

That means stopping schools from gaining access to passwords, much in the same way schools cannot go through your physical mail. I'm 100% in agreement with that measure, requiring password access should be barred. Schools, athletic departments and coaches go into the same category as employers in this one—they should not have password access to an individual's account.

That being said, the companies are largely doing what has become not just a necessary evil but a positive job in working as a tool—a tool to help further responsible usage of social media by their most high profile students, their student-athletes. Schools kick out mantras like "think before you post" and "don't post anything you wouldn't want your mama to see."

But, the fact is kids still make mistakes. They screw up. Tools like CentrixSocial, Varsity Monitor and UDiligence catch these slip ups—not to cause trouble or to browbeat kids, but to point out questionable posts and use these errors in judgement as teachable moments.

Almost a year ago, I got the chance to sit down and interview the guys behind CentrixSocial's monitoring service, SocialVerse. I had questions myself, and getting them on the podcast to discuss what the service was, how it worked and what they were looking for really cleared up a lot of the unknowns. If you're still uncertain as to what these programs do, here's that link and I recommend a listen.

You see, Senator Young is correct when it comes to password protected information. The athletes' private messages and private posts should not be monitored or viewed by school officials. That becomes an issue not just for the players, but for their friends and family members. Mom sending her son a Facebook message about grandpa's health status shouldn't be something the team finds out in a search. Girlfriends sending athletes a direct message about their relationship status shouldn't be something the school is privy to either.

But, the posts that friends and/or media have access to through searching accounts have to be looked at. North Carolina recently took a spill for this. No, not the public posts of Marvin Austin that created the NCAA firestorm. Rather the posts, thought to be private, of Donte Paige-Moss, that were exposed by folks who followed the Tar Heel defensive end on twitter.

Ultimately, services like SocialVerse do the job that many athletic departments are tasking their compliance and coaching staffs with doing—watching their teams' tweets and Facebook posts. Now, instead of spending their valuable man hours reading through the inane tweets of a bunch of 17-23 year olds they can merely check their email for flagged verbiage.

Terms get flagged, coaches and/or compliance read the post itself and figure out an appropriate response. A lot of times it will be nothing, but on the off-chance a player is making a poorly veiled drug reference or talks about getting free stuff, the alert works and action can be taken.

Walking the thin line between monitoring and invading privacy is not easy. These services help make a big job a bit smaller and do the job that it would take coaches and compliance a lot of hours to do.

Monitoring is a lot better than the alternative, banning the social media applications, and it allows for teachable moments at multiple levels. Not only will individual athletes learn how to better navigate the choppy waters of their pseudo-celebrity existence but their teammates and fellow athletes at the school can learn from their mistakes to grow more savvy as a group.