A Positive Image
Starts With Media Training
By Jim Henry
Jamil Northcutt doesn't mean to be nosy.
However, Northcutt, assistant athletic director for Internal
Operations at Ole Miss, wants to make sure Rebel student-athletes
understand the importance of protecting their brand and the
university's image each time they click into a social networking
page. Scouting out questionable content can keep athletes and
athletic programs out of embarrassing situations.
Northcutt isn't an old fogie, either.
The 29-year-old is a former Ole Miss linebacker and award winner
who spent three years as the player development coordinator for the
Kansas City Chiefs before he returned to his alma
mater in an administrative role. Northcutt realizes that social
networking pages offer new opportunities for persons to explore
interests, communicate with friends, develop technical skills, and
foster independence.
Yet, not all social networking is good social networking.
"We certainly respect the social networking rights of our
student-athletes but, at the same time, we also want them to be
mindful of how they present and represent themselves," Northcutt
told FanHouse.
"We want to educate our student-athletes and help them understand
how this can impact them today, tomorrow and 10 years from
now."
Northcutt and Ole Miss are accomplishing this with the help of
UDiligence.com, a Vermont firm that scans the social networking
profiles of Rebel athletes for any references to drugs, alcohol,
sex, violence, racial slurs or profanity.
UDiligence was founded by Kevin Long, a former
congressional press secretary, and a business partner. They have
invested more than three years and a substantial financial sum into
the patented social network monitoring system, complete with bells
and whistles, and currently work for more than a dozen athletic
programs nationally.
Long says his system is monitoring Facebook, MySpace and Twitter
pages -- 24 hours a day, seven days a week -- of more than 6,000
student-athletes from New Jersey Institute of Technology to the
University of Nebraska.
Pricing depends on the number of student-athletes and portal
configuration but costs from $1,350 per year for 50 athletes or
less to $5,000 per year for over 500 athletes.
"It only costs pennies a day per athlete to protect the athlete's
reputations and the image of the school," said Long.
Prior to UDiligence, Long started MVP Sports Media Training in
2004, and it was while doing background research for a few MVP
media trainings that he realized athletic programs across the
country faced serious issues with items being posted on social
networking sites by their student-athletes.
Compounding the problem was that, in many cases, athletic programs
were unaware of the potential trouble until someone from the media
called.
"By the time a reporter calls asking about it, it's too late.
You've lost the advantage from a public relations perspective. So I
asked myself what were they doing to protect their student-athletes
and their program from this sort of negative exposure?" Long
said.
"Most athletic departments still ignore the issue and hope nothing
happens. For those that do make an attempt, it is usually the
function of an intern, grad assistant or maybe an assistant coach
to manually go through these social networking sites to see what
their athletes are posting. It is both inefficient and ineffective
to try to manually monitor 50, 100, or 500 athletes on a consistent
basis.
"Inevitably they will miss something," Long said.
That something could quickly mushroom into a very bad day for
athlete and school. In fact, athletic departments are learning that
every student-athlete with a social-networking account is a
potential public relations disaster.
Several colleges have disciplined athletes for posting questionable
content on their social networking pages.
The University of Texas, for
example, kicked a player off its football team because of remarks
he made on his Facebook page about then-President-elect Barack
Obama. Four female soccer players at San Diego State University in
2006 were penalized for alcohol- and partying-related pictures they
posted on their personal Facebook accounts. And former Texas Tech
head coach Mike Leach banned the use of Twitter on his football
team.
Long said his system saved a small Midwest school and a male
student-athlete from negative press and potential legal trouble
when it caught the athlete's jesting reference to having a sniper
rifle.
"Within minutes after we alerted the administrator, the material
was taken down from the athlete's Facebook page," Long said.
The NCAA has not taken a formal stand on how much a university can
monitor or restrict accounts. From a legal perspective, however,
experts believe that schools have every right to restrict their
athletes from their involvement with social networking sites.
Long explained the UDiligence program scans the text on an
athlete's social networking page, including captions of photos and
videos, looking for more than 500 key words that have been flagged.
Athletic programs can also choose to customize the keyword list, be
alerted by email, and login to a secure web portal to check which
players have violated the rules.
UDiligence has also developed a consumer version of its service,
called YouDiligence.com. It is offered to parents for $9.99 a month
and allows them to monitor their children's pages on Facebook,
MySpace and Twitter, protecting them from cyber-bullies and web
predators, sending them email alerts when any of the keywords is
found.
Oliver Pierce, assistant athletic director at Gonzaga, said men's
basketball players were stunned to discover how easily Long's
company gained access to their social networking pages.
"As an outsider who had easy access to their information and as
someone they didn't know prior to (Long) walking into the room,
that made a huge impact on how they now view and utilize social
media," Pierce said.
Northcutt was in Mobile, Ala., early last week for Senior Bowl
practices. He met with friends and NFL colleagues, in addition to
former Ole Miss players such as Dexter
McCluster who participated in Saturday's high-profile game that
can boost their profiles for the NFL Draft.
Northcutt realizes that players need to make a favorable
impression, on and off the field.
Professional scouts talk to numerous coaches and administrators on
school visits to properly assess the reputations of draft hopefuls.
Background checks are extensive, including repeated sweeps of
social networking sites, and character counts. At least one NFL
team has contacted UDiligence about monitoring potential draft
pick's social networking pages for them, but Long won't say which
team is on the cutting-edge.
Former NFL coach Marty Schottenheimer said moral character and
football character are heavily scrutinized by evaluators throughout
the pre-draft process.
"If you have players of character, you never ever have to worry
about things on the periphery," Schottenheimer told FanHouse in
regards to the Internet and other issues.
"The team is the most important thing and you don't have to worry
about the distractions that can go along with player issues. I've
always believed that good people can win for you in many cases
where great players can't."
Northcutt pointed out that today's college athletes are part of a
generation that relies on the Internet to communicate with friends,
choosing to update their public profiles rather than making a
telephone call.
Many times athletes post a comment or photograph without
contemplating the ramifications. And no school or program is immune
from the damage that can be caused by careless postings and poor
decisions. For instance, there are more than 65 billion Facebook
page views per month, and 45 percent of users visit the site each
day.
"With the Internet, more times than not, this isn't a private
message between two people. In reality you are reaching an
international audience, and it's easy for a post to go viral,"
Northcutt said.
Long said his program has discovered on the social networking pages
photos of athletes posing with tens of thousands of dollars in
cash, guns and drugs. In each case, the school was automatically
notified by email with a link to the post. This is not just a
problem for big-time Division I programs. Long said there are
problematic social networking posts at every school.
"It's only a matter of time until every school has an issue
stemming from a student-athlete's social networking post," Long
said.
"It doesn't matter if they are an NAIA, NCAA Division II or III, a
mid-major, or a BCS conference school. If the local paper found out
some of the stuff the student-athletes are posting, it could be
personally devastating for the student-athlete and an unnecessary
and unpleasant distraction for the coach and athletic
director.
"It would ruin their week."
Both Northcutt and Long stress to student-athletes that image and
ability are connected at the hip -- or by the key stroke.
Northcutt said Ole Miss has used preseason meetings to teach
student-athletes on how to use social media in a way that promotes
the university and themselves. He said athletic departments must
combat the dangers of these sites by educating student-athletes
about the consequences of what they post and what others post
concerning them.
"When a student-athlete moves into the professional world, be it
athletics or business, they need to know that scouts and HR (human
resource) departments use these social networking pages as a way to
gauge the character of the people who are applying for jobs within
their company or on their team," Long said.
"For a professional team, this is a major investment, both
financially and personally. I had a basketball coach once tell me
the best way to predict the future with someone is to look at their
past."
And, for many student-athletes, that past -- good or bad -- is
documented on their social-networking pages. Forever.