Flight of fancy?

@sportsguy33 (ESPN columnist Bill Simmons) the officiating is so bad that it’s now ruining the playoffs. Outright travesty. This is now a pandemic of incompetency.

@mcuban (Mark Cuban) An Apology to Kenyon Martin’s Mom: It started as a smart ass comment that I know that no one heard.

@danicapatrick (Danica Patrick, replying to Shaquille O’Neal at @THE_REAL_SHAQ) I will race you! I think I have a slight weight/height advantage so I feel confident! haha.

And the list goes on. Players announce injury news, attempt some quick-hit analysis or simply disclose what they’re having for breakfast. Fantasy players scour for late-breaking information to help win their league. Teams and leagues look to boost ticket sales and TV viewership. Brands seek to position themselves as much warmer, friendlier entities. Columnists and reporters repackage their thoughts into mere sentence fragments.

Nearly every element of the sports industry now has some Twitter component. And only a tiny fraction of that torrent of tweets was occurring just six months ago.

The microblogging service Twitter — in which all posts are limited to 140 text characters or less, making it ideal for mobile devices — has existed for about three years. But within the last half-year, a massive wave of new interest among all walks of the sports industry has helped create an exponential increase in overall Twitter activity, and in very short order fundamentally redefined how the sports business communicates with itself and its fans.

“Twitter is definitely a very important thing. There is a level of proximity and immediacy one cannot get elsewhere, and even compared to Facebook, something that can really broaden horizons,” said Kathleen Hessert, president of Charlotte-based Sports Media Challenge. The firm helped Shaquille O’Neal launch on Twitter to major success, reaching more than 1 million followers, and Hessert’s evangelization of the platform has given her the nickname of “The Twitter Lady.”

Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams (left)
listens as co-founder Biz Stone speaks at the
company’s San Francisco headquarters.

“People who ignore this, and social media in general, do so at their own peril,” Hessert said.

Other recent, high-profile examples of Twitter-mania have included the University of Tennessee’s new coach, Lane Kiffin, using Twitter to revive fan interest in the football program, and then committing a recruiting violation by discussing player commitments in his tweets; the NFL draft getting turned on its ear this year by tweets of some draft picks going out before they were announced on stage; and the NHL staging an international “tweetup” of fans across three continents. Danica Patrick, originally resistant of Twitter, began tweeting last month at the urging of watch sponsor Tissot, a move representative of growing corporate interest in the platform.

But amid all that tweeting, critical questions remain: Particularly, can Twitter become a meaningful, sustainable revenue-driver for sports entities, particularly as Twitter itself has yet to create a revenue model? And is Twitter simply a short-run fad, destined to go down as 2009’s version of the pet rock as fans, players and executives alike flock to the next big thing in social media?

“Twitter’s very quickly become one of the established [social media] platforms you talk about, right along with Facebook, YouTube and the like,” said Dan Opallo, NBA marketing manager. “But I don’t know that anybody’s really figured out how to make money on this yet. Anything that we would call results is really more anecdotal at this point.”

Growth story

Large bursts of audience growth are nothing new in digital media, particularly social-oriented measures. Facebook, MySpace and YouTube all experienced periods in which they more than doubled their audience over a 12-month span. But Twitter has essentially been able to do that in 30-day stretches.

In August of last year, Twitter attracted roughly 2.3 million unique U.S. visitors according to Nielsen, more than a 400 percent jump from the same month in 2007. By February 2009, that audience grew to 4 million U.S. users and 10 million globally. Then what’s often called “the hockey stick chart” really became evident. The March 2009 global audience mushroomed to 19 million, according to comScore Media Metrix, and then to 32 million in April, with 17 million of that latter figure based in the U.S.

The number of global users of Twitter has
nearly doubled every month of the past year.

May numbers have yet to be tabulated, but a global number at or near 50 million is quite possible. And the comScore numbers are for Web-based usage only and do not count mobile-based traffic, where lots of Twitter activity occurs.

“We knew there’d be growth. But we’d be lying if we said we were expecting this much, this fast,” said Jim DeLorenzo, vice president of Octagon Digital. The agency this year created Twackle, which aggregates sports-related tweets into customizable feeds. Twackle additionally is aligned with several teams, including the Washington Capitals and Phoenix Suns, in an official capacity.

That historic run-up, executives say, owes to several key factors. Twitter has gained not only active participation by dozens of influential leaders and popular players such as O’Neal and President Obama’s campaign team, but those notable figures were among its earliest adopters. Such a dynamic, fueled in part by Twitter’s ease of use compared with traditional blogging, meaningfully reversed typical ground-up trends in technology adoption.

From the simple surroundings of its headquarters,
Twitter could stand the social media world on its
ear, but first it must come up with a sustainable
business model.

There was also a desire among many sports properties to participate in the earlier phases of Twitter’s growth as opposed to playing catch-up as some still are with Facebook, which is the globe’s largest social network with its monthly unique users now surpassing 300 million.

“People definitely want to get out front of this in a way that didn’t happen with Facebook, so it’s become almost sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” DeLorenzo said.

The economy additionally plays a big factor. With budgets constrained, disposable income falling, and ticket sales generally flat or falling, sports properties are increasingly searching for ways to create new means of fan engagement.

“With us, it really started with the commissioner [Roger Goodell] challenging us going into the new year to find new ways to reach fans,” said Brian McCarthy, NFL vice president of corporate communications. McCarthy tweets under the name NFLprguy. “We started experimenting around the holidays, and then knew we had a big opportunity in front of us with the draft and then heading into the new season.”

But can it make money?

Consumers’ acceptance and appreciation for Twitter is now no longer in doubt. Beyond O’Neal’s well-known seven-figure group of followers, other popular sports feeds with followers in the hundreds of thousands include those from the NBA and NFL league offices, Lance Armstrong and Tony Hawk. ESPN aggregates to a somewhat similar number amid the dozens of various Twitter feeds dedicated to individual writers, shows and sports news interests, including a lively one from Bill Simmons.

But can one make money on any of that traffic and activity? Only recently have digital media businesses such as Citizen Sports Network and Watercooler begun to build revenue-generating sports products and communities around Facebook. MySpace, despite an eroding audience, is a more mature entity than even Facebook in selling advertising, particularly in the U.S. And MySpace also benefits from an exclusive deal with Google for search ads on the social network, and a joint venture with music recording labels.

Amid some of those relatively modest successes, however, selling advertisers on social media in general remains a definite work in progress as marketers still seek to learn more about how best to aggregate and engage consumers in those settings.

That unsettled dynamic helps explain why online-based activations as a percentage of overall U.S. advertising — estimated at less than 1 percent — have yet to correlate to the continual surges in actual time spent online by consumers. And it helps explain why Twitter co-founder Biz Stone recently expressed minimal interest in building a business model for the company based on display advertising. The company for now is subsisting on its venture capital funds.

“The idea of taking money to run traditional banner ads on Twitter.com has always been low on our list of interesting ways to generate revenue,” Stone wrote recently on the company’s blog. “However, facilitating connections between businesses and individuals in meaningful and relevant ways is compelling. We’re going to leave the door open for exploration in this area.”

There have been instances of selling ads against Twitter activity on third-party sites, though. Some aggregation sites such as SportsFanLive.com’s AthleteTweets and SportsBlogTweets have been able to sell traditional online display ads to mainstream corporate brands. And many tweets contain Web links back to sites that are monetized by advertising or subscription revenue.

“We’re very bullish about selling against this,” said David Katz, SportsFanLive.com founder. “We’re seeing definite interest in tier-one brands who want to be engaged with this. Content and tweet discovery on Twitter is still rather difficult, so we’ve put together something that takes the work out of that, and in the process, we can go to advertisers with a product that we think is more compelling and more authentic than a raw Twitter feed.”

But generating even more interest is exploring new ways to insert corporate messages within tweet feeds, such as more organic name-dropping of brands, or simply tweeting TV tune-in reminders and ticket availability offers.

That strategy presents significant risk, as many consumers are turned off by any whiff of overt corporate messaging in what they consider content. The sweet spot, many brand executives say, is finding the Twitter equivalent of product placement now common on TV.

Such is the mind-set of Tissot’s push of Patrick into Twitter. The company’s watches and logo are on Patrick’s Twitter landing page. And the IndyCar Series driver intends to mention the company on occasion in her tweets. But there is no set quota for Tissot mentions in Patrick’s tweets, and no additional money changed hands beyond the existing sponsorship.

“This is a really soft approach we’re undertaking,” said Sharon Buntain, Tissot U.S. brand president. “This is more about brand awareness for us, and doing it in a forum that’s increasingly relevant given that many people don’t even want to wait to go online for information, much less tomorrow’s newspaper.”

That kind of brand-building, less connected to direct revenue, is under way at dozens of other teams and leagues, using Twitter as essentially a large, free, global and real-time focus group ideal for monitoring and shaping consumer opinion. Not only is such tweet data more current than what’s typically on an Internet message board, it’s far less prone to be taken over by a small number of people as many chat boards are.

“That is really consumer research and conversation that knows no boundaries,” McCarthy said. “The search function on Twitter, for instance, is invaluable. Right now, this is really about fan development. But like anything else of this sort, we’ve begun to have internal conversations about building this into a revenue generator.”

Will Twitter stick around?

Even before Twitter’s meteoric growth has shown any signs of peaking, many executives and observers are asking whether this already is the beginning of the end of Twitter’s true relevancy. Such doubts are rooted in once red-hot social media sites such as MySpace that have since lost significant luster.

Not following along
Results from the Turnkey Sports Poll taken in May show that most sports executives have so far taken a pass on Twitter. The survey covered more than 1,100 senior-level executives spanning professional and college sports.
Do you personally use Twitter? If yes, what do you use it for? (Select all that apply)
(Respondent % shown below)
N/A — I do not use Twitter	77.99%
Following friends	11.20%
Following media members/celebrities	11.20%
Posting tweets	10.42%
Following my favorite teams	8.11%
Following athletes	5.41%
Does your company use Twitter? If yes, then what does your company primarily use it for?
N/A — My company does not use Twitter	34.75%
Connecting with fans/consumers	32.05%
Distribution of news/content	15.44%
Promotions/special offers/sweepstakes	2.32%
Other	0.77%
No response/Not sure	14.67%
Source: Turnkey Sports & Entertainment in conjunction with SportsBusiness Journal. Turnkey Intelligence specializes in research, measurement and lead generation for brands and properties. Visit www.turnkeyse.com.

And some Twitter statistics already show signs of heavy user churn, which makes the development of a long-term business model even more difficult. According to online research firm Quantcast, 72 percent of Twitter’s monthly traffic comes from one-time visitors who don’t return, and just 1 percent from daily visitors. Comparatively, Facebook generates 12 percent of its traffic from daily visitors, and 34 percent from one-time passersby.

Also unresolved is how Twitter will address its issues of scale over the long term. Twitter’s utility is based in part on combining a direct connection with the notion of immediacy. But some marketing executives believe that no single person is physically able to interface on Twitter with every single person and brand in which they hold an interest.

“One-to-one conversations that Twitter fosters are fun and even valuable at a low level of participation,” said Will Akerlof, head of Los Angeles-based Liquid Advertising. The firm works with several entertainment and consumer brands, including Adidas and Upper Deck. “There are some brands that are doing things on Twitter that are notable and perhaps even profitable. But as Twitter gets larger and the number of people, conversations and brands on Twitter grows, the value of those conversations become less and less.”

Still, a general consensus exists that microblogging is here to stay in some form, regardless of whether Twitter fades out, is sold and folded into a bigger entity, or becomes a dominant, mature operation with sustained revenue.

“We may very well end up going on to something else a year from now or whatever,” said Rob King, ESPN.com editor in chief. “But that level of direct connection with the fan has to remain, and it will — no question.”