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Athletes, teams can't resist Twitter

There may be a new, mightier pecking order in the global village. From bottom up: the sword, the pen, the tweet. That's tweet as in Twitter.

(Note: There are 140 characters in the paragraph above. That's the max allowed in the Twitter universe.)

Approaching its fifth anniversary, Twitter, concise by design, has become a powerful communication tool in the ever-expanding world of social media. Its influence has been varied. It has been cited as a factor in helping to topple governments in the Arab world over the spring. Closer to home, 140-character messages have become a social networking staple used effectively by those involved in politics, entertainment and sports.

Oh yes, Twitter is unfiltered and instantaneous. And as disgraced Congressman Anthony Weiner learned, there is no eraser.

In the wide world of sports, it quickly has become a tool of choice for athletes, teams and leagues to disseminate information — often well before conventional news outlets catch on. For instance: If you follow Rudy Fernandez on Twitter, you learned about his trade to the Mavericks during Thursday night's NBA draft long before the official announcement.

Twitter has proved an effective way of getting a point across. It is a marketer's dream. But it can be a nightmare as well. That athletes love it should come as no surprise.

"They may be the most susceptible of all to the lure of tweeting because of their competitive natures," says Kathleen Hessert, a North Carolina-based social media consultant who tutors on the power of Twitter as well as its do's and don'ts.

"Statistics are important in athletes' worlds," she said. "They have a drive to have the most followers."

Twitter conveniently keeps score for tweeters and offers the online statistics pertaining to number of followers for the world to see.

"Sometimes the athletes hope to get numbers by getting attention," Hessert said. "Some try to push the envelope. They have an air of invincibility. That's dangerous on Twitter."

By virtue of having helped launch Shaquille O'Neal's Twitter account, Hessert is considered one of the nation's foremost experts on the subject.

The latest statistics posted at a website called twitaholic%.com has the recently retired Shaq, who had the advantage of coming to tweeting with an established larger-than-life personality, with just shy of 4 million followers. That's most among anyone involved in American sports. It ranks Shaq 28th in the world.

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