What Pro Athletes Can Learn from Tony LaRussa's Twitter Debacle

I’m not a professional athlete and I don’t pretend to be one on TV or anywhere else for that matter. However, I have the privilege of working with many professional athletes by helping them manage and build their online brand through our site and some of the other web2.0 technologies that we integrated into our site.

Oddly enough, the most interesting question I get from athletes that consider our opportunity is “why should I care about my online image?” It’s a fair question, and here is how I explain my answer.

In this day and age, I believe more than ever one should care about their online image especially if they are a professional athlete.  Why? 

Because if you don’t, someone else can hijack your brand, destroy your credibility and/or even start to profit off of you faster than Willy Mays Hays stealing second base in Major League.

Let’s take for example the recent lawsuit by St. Louis Cardinal coach Tony LaRussa. He recently sued Twitter because a fake twitter account that was associated with him was posting “offensive material.” The individual probably started it out as a funny way to mock the coach, but it quickly spiraled out of control. While normal channels didn’t seem to help, Coach LaRussa was left to force the issue through legal means.

This is not only the first time, nor the last time this will happen to a professional athlete, but as a result, Twitter started creating “verified accounts” for celebrities on the site.  However, if you are Tony LaRussa, you’re two steps too late and you’re not a happy man.

Now, Twitter’s response was good first move, but Twitter is only one of a plethora of places where people gather information about you or try to engage with professional athletes...or at least think they are.

When it isn’t, it’s not pretty, like Philadelphia Eagles Brian Dawkins, who had a MySpace page taken down because it wasn’t his or the fake rumor that Ben Roethlisberger had tweeted he had cancer. On the other extreme, an athlete can proactively try to deflect any opportunity to high-jack their online brand like Eli Manning did, who publically announced that neither he nor Peyton wouldn’t be using Twitter.

If you are a professional athlete, you probably think that it’s useless to try to manage you brand, but I say otherwise. Your brand is like your social security number: you just need to take some simple steps to ensure your brand doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. 

If you think your own online identity may be compromised, then an easy first step to take is to Google yourself. That’ll be a good barometer if you have a problem or not.  Then use twittersearch or tweetdeckto search for yourself to see if someone has taken your username or is writing negative things about you via twitter.

If you do find that you’ve been social media “hacked,” be prepared for an Iwo Jima-like approach to reclaiming your online presence. It may take a couple of days to reclaim or close your fake Twitter account, and then you can start looking around to other ways your online brand could be compromised including some of the following sites:

-My Space

-Facebook

-Individual fan sites that say “official” fan page

If you’ve been compromised, then get in contact with the company directly to present your case. In the cases I’ve been a part of, once you’ve confirmed your identity, companies are usually willing to help out.

Once you’ve regained control or eliminated the sites in question, you need to determine if you want to maintain an offensive or defensive approach to managing your online brand moving forward. If you think that people give up quickly, think again. (Ben Roethlisberger indicated in the article above there were more than 50 MySpace pages claiming to him alone.)

From my personal experience working with professional athletes, taking the offensive approach is the better road. Once you establish where you set up shop, whether it’s MySpace, Facebook, Twitter or even our site at FanFuego, you can determine how often and what you want to communicate. At the end of the day, your fans want to know where you are.  Give a place to tell them where you are…or tell them where you’re not.

Steve Raquel is an online social media expert who helps manage the online lives of dozen of professional athletes as the VP athlete relations of FanFuego.com, an online sports social network that connects pro athletes with passionate fans. Contact Steve directly at [e-mail] or follow him on twitter at @sraquel.