Kathleen Hessert's Sports Media Challenge alerts its clients to the buzz from mainstream media to Twitter and Facebook.by Mark Kram, Philadelphia Daily News
Read online: Colleges, pros find ally to help guard image in new media landscape
SAY YOU ARE the athletic director or coach at a university somewhere in America. Generally, you have done whatever you can to run a clean program, yet a certain part of you lives in fear of that 3 a.m. phone call: One of your players has been arrested on a drug charge or has ended up in some other embarrassing circumstance. Suddenly, you find yourself in a crisis that you could not have seen coming. Keeping an eye on what an individual is doing with his or her free time is impossible.
Or is it?
Given how the paradigm of information exchange has evolved, it is quite possible you could have gotten a heads-up about a potential problem if you had signed up with
Sports Media Challenge, which has implemented a search engine called Buzz Manager. By scanning literally millions of sources from mainstream media such as blogs, discussion groups, Twitter and YouTube, Buzz Manager provides its clients with an array of what SMC president Kathleen Hessert refers to as "intelligence" on coaches, players and even fans, along with potential NCAA violations, illegal or inappropriate behavior and any other issue that could adversely affect how the school is perceived in the public eye.
"Immediately, we send out what we call a 'Red Alert Report,' " says Hessert, who grew up in Haddonfield and runs SMC out of Charlotte, N.C.
"We inform the client: 'This what we found. This is the source. This is the level of chatter surrounding it. And this is how we think you should handle it.' "
With March Madness upon us, the 11-person staff at SMC will be busier than ever keeping up with the sudden increase in information expected to flood the Internet. At a cost to the school of $1,000 per month for just the automated service and $3,000 per month with analysis, Hessert says Buzz Manager works as an "unaided focus group" that not just pinpoints questionable behavior but can help the client identify trends and develop products that can strengthen its brand. Hessert says the information provided on a weekly basis is "essentially wrapped up in a digital dashboard" and is accompanied by a "buzz rating," which gives a sense of the degree to which something is viewed in a positive or negative light. Red Alert Reports are forwarded immediately.
Clients such as Penn State have to then decide what to do with the information.
Of if the information is even true.
Greg Myford, Penn State associate AD for business relations and communications, has come to see SMC as something akin to the Weather Channel. But instead of identifying storm cells forming in the Pacific Ocean, SMC provides its clients with a snapshot of information that is out there in some remote corner of the World Wide Web. To carry the Weather Channel analogy forward, Myford says SMC enables him to "see [the storm] before the lightning splits the tree in the front yard." Which is to say: He can step in and stop something that is factually inaccurate from spreading "before it takes on a life."
Insofar as monitoring the behavior of players or even any rumors that come up regarding coaches or prospective hires, Hessert says it comes down to this: What is the source of the information and is that source reliable?
"Sometimes what we come up with could be a complete fabrication by someone," says Hessert, who has no competitors in the sports field. "Or it could even be an opponent who is out there trying to cause trouble. The bottom line is: We have identified a threat. Now what do we do with it?"
Given the increasing awareness of society in a new information age, clients from across a wide spectrum have climbed on board with SMC. Along with Penn State - which is in its third year with Hessert - some of the colleges that have signed on include Michigan State, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, North Carolina and Notre Dame. Among individual athletes who have hired Hessert are Derek Jeter, Peyton Manning and Shaquille O'Neal. Other clients include the NCAA, the NFL, the PGA Tour, the Boston Celtics, the Toronto Maple Leafs, Coca-Cola, ESPN and Nike.
"More and more, we have to have clear understanding of what our customers are thinking and what they are saying," Myford says. "As the digital world continues to evolve at a pace that each of us is struggling to keep up with, [SMC] enables us to tap into it by following the volume out there."
One aspect of the new information age is that traditional media (such as this newspaper) and the variety of social media outlets (such as Facebook and Twitter) can no longer be looked upon as separate entities. Increasingly, it has become common for traditional news gatherers to scan social media sources for material.
Hessert says that "every single day the Wall Street Journal, ESPN, Sports Illustrated and the New York Times quote what used to be considered non-media sources like Deadspin and Bleacher Report." In fact, Hessert quotes a survey conducted by Georgetown University that found that "83 percent of journalists use social media sources to trigger stories [of their own]." Good journalists verify that information, but as Hessert points out, "the genesis of the story occurred in social media."
"So what happens is, [traditional media] writes the story, prints it and inserts a link in social media to give it even wider exposure," says Hessert, who began her career in radio and TV before entering public relations in the 1980s. "Trying to separate traditional media and social media today is like trying to unscramble an egg. It cannot be done. And once information is out there, it moves across the Internet in nanoseconds."
Opinions vary on the extent to which erroneous information appears or what to do with it when it pops up. In the case of Penn State, Villanova and Temple, the consensus seems to be that while they have to be more vigilant than ever, sometimes you are better off just leaving something unaddressed. Myford says that "just because it appears out there does not mean you have a problem." He says erroneous information becomes a problem only when "a credible source decides to pick it up and go with it." He adds that credible sources usually self-correct, which is to say "they quickly realize there is an error." Occasionally, he will ask Hessert or someone on her staff for their opinion on what to do.
And their advice would be?
Hessert says "it depends."
"We have to get a feel for whether or not the information is getting any traction," says Hessert, who came upon the concept of Buzz Manager in 2003 while working with a potential NFL player before the draft that year. (She would not identify him.) "Sometimes we will say it is nothing to worry about. But if it gets to a certain tipping point, and it has found its way into a particular environment - say, Deadspin or TMZ - we will tell them: 'You need to address this now. And this is how you do it.' "
Hessert helped Peyton and Eli Manning get to the bottom of a problem that came up a few years ago. Someone was posing as them on Facebook and Twitter.
"They said, 'Kathleen, what should we do about it?' " says Hessert. "So I went to the individual who was doing this and asked them to stop. When I got no response, I went to a source at Facebook and Twitter and asked them to take it down. Additionally, I went to some traditional media sources with high credibility, such as Sports Illustrated and the New York Times, and asked them to send the message out that this person is not who they say they are, and that Peyton and Eli are not on Facebook or Twitter."
Two athletic departments that have not signed on with SMC are Villanova and Temple; both have chosen to handle in-house any monitoring of the Internet. According to Villanova AD Vince Nicastro, his department does not have "a systematic way of identifying and capturing what is being said [about its athletic teams]." However, he did say that the university provides him with a daily update called "Villanova in the Media," which is a summary "of all the media hits that have come out in a given day that are good, bad or indifferent." Nicastro adds that he understands "we are in a new reality and have to be more nimble than ever before."
"It used to be that we could wait until the next morning and just see what the newspapers had to say," he says. "No one has that luxury anymore. This is a whole new dynamic."
Can Villanova duplicate in-house the same service that SMC provides?
"We are probably not doing it to the extent they are, if only because they are devoting their full resources to it," Nicastro says. "But we are certainly aware in that we are trying to do whatever we can to monitor the flow of information out there."
Temple associate AD for communications Larry Dougherty echoes that. Members of the communications and marketing staff monitor the Internet for Temple references. Saying that "we live in a 24/7 environment . . . that continues to change," Dougherty says that in addition to credentialing traditional media for games, he also considers requests from new media. While he has not yet gone as far as St. John's, which recently credentialed someone with a Twitter account who has 50,000 followers, he concedes that "a lot of our fans are getting their information in nontraditional ways."
Would Temple consider signing on with SMC?
Dougherty says that as the football and basketball programs continue to grow and prosper, "it may be something we will have to take a look at."
Myford says Penn State could not do in-house what SMC provides. "We could do some of the components," he says. "But insofar as placing it in a framework and presenting it as a single snapshot with some level of analysis, we are not resourced that way in either numbers or, in some cases, expertise."
Given how she has more or less positioned her company as "the eyes and ears" of the Internet in the sports world, Hessert says she expects even more clients to sign on in the years ahead. In fact, she says business could not be better.
Even with the economy in turmoil.
She has been hiring.