In reality, many athlete and agency profiles across various social media platforms are not run by the athletes or top executives themselves.  What too often is the case is that an intern will be given the responsibility of updating Twitter, Facebook, and blog accounts to make it seem like the words are coming straight from the mouth of the athlete or the company CEO, when it could not be further from the truth.  Does this make sense?  In my opinion, no, and if fans/followers/friends catch on (which should not be a hard task), it could be damaging.  Athletes and CEOs, with proper training, can handle the “chore” of posting regularly on these networks, and may even enjoy it.  The one exception for me, is that I will often post updates on my clients’ Facebook Fan Pages just to keep fans updated on achievements of the players and their stats.

It will be much tougher to convince an agency’s CEO to be a regular on social networks than convincing athlete clients (they will probably be on there whether you teach them best practices or not).  After all, why should a CEO bother with the mundane task of sending Tweets containing 140 characters or less, writing lengthy blog posts, or posting updates on Facebook, a site originally created for college students to hookup with and poke each other?

Mashable.com recently talked with Forrester Research CEO George Colony in an effort to understand why so few CEOs are personally using social media and whether or not they should be involved, anyway.

• Fears and issues preventing adoption: Age (most are still trying to switch from the typewriter to the computer), possible regulatory restraints (especially for public companies), risks (of offending customers, partners, BoD and of increased litigation), time.

Casey Wasserman of WMG is tweeting, but he is a young CEO.  Ted Forstmann of IMG and Jonathan Blue of BEST have no Twitter presence.

• Reasons to tweet: Desire (to communicate and to take risks) and audience (will employees and targeted customers listen, participate, comment, criticize?).

If a CEO has absolutely no interest in Tweeting or posting updates to his Facebook page, then there is no reason that the CEO should be forced or encouraged to do so by anybody.  And the CEO also may be someone who is very risk averse.  More importantly, who is the audience for a sports agency CEO?  Is it only the players?  If so, it will be hard to use updates on social media sites to reach those players.  If current clients follow the CEO, they may enjoy reading the updates.  Potential clients will most likely never read them.  But beyond athlete clients, a CEO’s partners, business acquaintances, friends in the media, employees, etc. may appreciate receiving updates, and this granted information may open up doors for opportunities for the CEO’s business.

There is no mandatory number of Tweets or updates for the CEO.  I know that time is a concern, but how often will a CEO be stuck at an airport staring at his Blackberry waiting for the next incoming email to appear?  In that time, why not send out a Tweet updating the world on something that is going on in your or your company’s life?  It makes the CEO seem more like a human being (isn’t that what he is?), which is something employees and clients appreciate.

And it’s not only about posting content.  CEO’s should be keeping up with what is written about them and their companies, and also what others are writing about other companies (including material written by the competition, themselves).  Truthfully, this site should be a bookmark, and CEO’s should also be watching The Master Twitter list of sports agents/agencies.

My colleague Douglas Sanders with The Sports Link introduced me to the new service, which strives to make it easier for athletes to connect with their fans by providing “text only once, but update fans everywhere” convenience.  If an athlete sends a text message to MogoTXT, MogoTXT can automatically forward that message to the athlete’s fans on MogoTXT, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and all other websites.

Terrell Owens, Shane Battier, Chris “Beanie” Wells, Santonio Holmes, Jordan Farmar, and even Mr. Holdout, Michael Crabtree, are on board, along with many more athletes and rising journalists.  Some entities use the service more than others.  T.O. is updating the world on his life almost every second of the day…Beanie Wells, not so much.

In addition to providing ease and convenience to athletes, MogoTXT is able to aggregate the fans of an athlete that are located on several different websites into a single large audience to enable the athlete to achieve critical mass much faster for purposes of fan relations, marketing, advertising, etc.  The theory is that the service will empower athletes and their agents to strike better endorsement deals by enhancing athletes’ reach and providing marketing data.

MogoTXT can also facilitate revenue generation for athletes and their selected charities by working with athletes and their agents to feature desirable ads and clickable links to additional content and ads at the bottom of the athletes’ text messages before these messages are displayed on MogoTXT and also distributed to fans on all of the major social networks.

And for the Yao Mings and Kobe Bryants with huge international appeal, MogoTXT can also translate the messages into foreign languages on a near real-time basis.

Best of all, the service is free for its clients and their fans.

Dan Schawbel wrote a piece at Mashable.com that discusses 5 Ways to Take Control of Your Personal Brand.

1. Create your Google profile.  Here’s mine.
2. Reserve your name on social networks.  I have reserved “heitner”, “dynasty”, or “dynastyreps” on many of them.
3. Establish a personal hub.  See www.DarrenHeitner.com.
4. Have a reputation management strategy.  My RSS reader tracks any stories that are written about my clients.
5. Promote your expertise.  Email me to become a subject for our Interview with the Agent column.  Not worth your time?  Okay.

What else should be added to this list?

Josh Feinberg: Can you speak on your career path and experience leading to Octagon?

Jim DeLorenzo: My experience has been heavy on the digital media side and not as much on the sports side.  I was pretty fortunate that I was able to eventually combine the two (digital media and sports) because I actually am a huge sports fan.  My background started with law (as an attorney) almost a decade ago, representing the original Napster.  From the law firm and handling those types of digital media property issues, I moved over to AOL where I was handling a lot of mobile and instant messaging transactions.  I then ended up becoming head of business development and took care of the marketing issues for a start up (company) called Qloud, which was backed by Steve Case and his company Revolution.  I focused primarily on online music applications that lived inside the various social networks.

We launched initially on Facebook and then quickly moved to MySpace, High Five, Friendster, and all the others.  In less than a year, we ramped up about 7 millions users or so.  I had a successful exit with Qloud and at the time of that exit, I was looking around and trying to decide if I was going to continue with the acquiring company or move somewhere else.  At that moment, a position popped up at Octagon, which was looking for somebody to stand up their Digital Division.

So again, being a huge sports fan and obviously being involved in the digital media space, it seemed like a good opportunity to combine the two.  Now at Octagon, running the Digital Division, I have two main responsibilities, one of which is to find new digital marketing channels for our athletes online.  Another is to develop our own stand alone digital properties, the first of which is Twackle.com.

Josh Feinberg: Following your undergraduate work, I take it, that it was not your intention to work in the Sports Industry?

Jim DeLorenzo: I wouldn’t say I didn’t have any intention of working in sports, but it wasn’t something I was actively trying to pursue.  It wasn’t as if I was pursuing internships (in the sports industry).  Again, I’m a gigantic sports fan, so I always thought it would be something that would be fun but it wasn’t something I was going to actively pursue.

I went straight from undergrad to law school, then law school down to a firm here in D.C.  So I was not necessarily following a career path that would typically lead you to a sports related company.

Josh Feinberg: When did you join Octagon?

Jim DeLorenzo: About a year ago.

Josh Feinberg: For those not familiar with Octagon, can you give a brief overview of the company?

Jim DeLorenzo: Octagon is a global company.  Octagon Athletes and Personalities is based here in McLain, Virginia.  We have about 800 athletes worldwide representing pretty much every major sport.  Some of our bigger clients include Michael Phelps and Chris Paul.

Josh Feinberg: Now can you go into what you do within the Digital sector and how that is incorporated into Octagon Athletes and Personalities?

Jim DeLorenzo: Well I think what you are seeing, more and more is that people are consuming their sports content online.  Every athlete, every league, and every team are looking for ways to connect with their fans online and are shifting to different online platforms.  For Octagon, one of my responsibilities is to help the agents find the right opportunities for their athletes in a digital medium.  An example would be, if you go to NBA.com, they have videos running of Chris Paul.  They have behind the scene videos chronicling what it is like to be a young, NBA super-star.  Having NBA.com as a platform, to push those videos has a lot of benefits for Chris (Paul).  That is one of the things I am doing out of the digital sector.

Basically, I am trying to find digital marketing opportunities for our athletes online and helping to provide both the athletes and the agents more of a consistent digital strategy.

Josh Feinberg: Looking at the social media platforms, specifically Twitter… We have seen an explosion of athletes and personalities jumping on-board.  What is your reaction to the Twitter craze?

Jim DeLorenzo: Again, that gets back to the whole concept of athletes, teams, leagues, and different brands trying to find new ways to connect with their fans online.  For a long time for an athlete or a team, that meant writing a blog.  To write a blog, that really does not fit into an athlete’s daily schedule because they are busy being a professional athlete, which is all-consuming.  When you have somebody that is a professional blogger, they are sitting there banging out a couple posts per day on a team or player.  Than you have the player who is spending the vast majority of their time focusing on being a professional athlete, which is what they should be doing.  So they are always going to be at a disadvantage to the professional bloggers, in terms of the amount of content they can produce and how much time they can spend trying to make that content compelling.

Now you have Twitter come along, all of a sudden, you have a channel that athletes can use that fits into their life very easily.  They can use their mobile device to send a short, 140 character messages.  It doesn’t require them to sit in front of a computer.  They could be on their way to practice or on their way back from a game.  Or in the case of Charlie Villanueva the other night, have the ability to throw out a Twitter post in the middle of a game, during halftime.  It fits to more into the athletes’ life style and the time constraints that they have, which are very demanding.

The great thing for the fan, because of the immediacy of Twitter and the fact that Shaq could write something during half-time, or even sit at a diner and say “come meet me at the diner and I’ll give you free tickets to the Suns’ game tonight”.  The immediacy is something that you can’t replicate in a blog.  It provides a benefit to the fan that wasn’t there before; this feeling of immediacy and intimacy with the athletes and having a real connection there.  That’s one of the things that make it appealing to the fan and consumer standpoint.  I think it’s (Twitter) only going to continue to grow.  It really fits into the athlete’s life and the consumer loves it because they’re getting little nuggets of information faster and more on a real-time basis than they ever could otherwise.

Josh Feinberg: What exactly is Twackle?

Jim DeLorenzo: One of the problems you have with Twitter is that there are massive amounts of data and it becomes difficult for people to manage it.  One of the things that we thought would be helpful is to have a sports focused front end on Twitter.  What we do, we find and aggregate all the messages on Twitter related to sports and put them into Twackle.com in the appropriate area using our navigation.  This allows the user to quickly find the topic they are looking for.  We surface all of these messages in the form of “feeds” which allows the user to find feeds on a topic very quickly.  Whether that’s the NFL, New York Giants or a particular player on the New York Giants, they can drill down and find the information they feel is compelling very easily.  If they’re looking at our NY Giants feed – we are pulling that information in real time, every message seen on Twitter will feed into Twackle.  There it is an aggregation and discovery tool for sports content on Twitter.  Beyond that, you have the ability to have a native Twitter integration.  You can log into Twackle using your Twitter ID and password.  With that integration, when you post a message live on Twackle, it shows on your Twitter stream.  You end up with a multi platform play as the user.  If you look, there’s actually a top ‘Twacklers’ module that shows the people that have used Twackle the most over the past week.  Some of those people are actually teams.  For example, the Charlotte Bobcats are on there.  They’ve started to use Twackle and use it as one of their platforms for distributing their Twitter messages as they live ‘tweet’ during games.

Josh Feinberg: How long since Twackle went live?

Jim DeLorenzo: We got something up there with Twackle at the beginning of this year.  In its current form, we started telling people about it back in February.  There was actually a Sports Business Journal article about it early in February.  It really hasn’t been that long, you’re looking at 4-6 weeks since we went live.  It’s pretty new and we continue to rev out new functions.  We have some pretty cool things coming down the pike that I think people are going to find very interesting.  It’s relatively young in the cycle right now.

Josh Feinberg: With Twackle’s initial launch, I would imagine it’s not perfect and it does not satisfy everyone out there.  Can users suggest information they would like to see on Twackle?

Jim DeLorenzo: People can always send us messages; we do have the ability to send comments back.  They could also send messages through the Twackle feed.  We are always open to suggestions.  User feedback is crucial for Twackle.  We recently had the people of ‘Women Talk Sports’, which is a great blog obviously focused on Women in Sports; reach out to us telling us we need more content around Women’s Sports.  They were right and we did.  We’re definitely open to any suggestions on a content side…any content areas we are not currently covering – we definitely want to hear about that, along with any suggestions.  It’s pretty easy for us to throw up items in regards to a specific topic, as long as there is content behind it. On the functionality side, same thing, we always like to hear from people.  Any comment from our users is always helpful.  It’s a huge advantage to have that connection with our users.

Josh Feinberg: Any other features the user should be aware of?

Jim DeLorenzo: One other functionality I wanted to mention was the ‘Top Links’ module.  For every one of our feeds, take the NY Jets and Kerry Rhodes who is a safety on the Jets, he has his own Twitter page.  We have 800 or so feeds that we continue to add everyday.  For every one of those feeds, we pull out the links on an on-going rolling basis for the past 24 hours, the links that were sent the most through those feeds.  If you look at the general NFL feeds, the module shows the links sent the most; either on Twackle or Twitter- and the Top Links module becomes a user generated recommendation engine.

Josh Feinberg: What is the relation with Twackle and Octagon:

Jim DeLorenzo: It’s an Octagon Digital property.  The ultimate plan is to spin it out and turn Twackle into its own independent entity.

Josh Feinberg: To close, let’s relax a bit with few quick response questions:

Josh Feinberg: Favorite Athlete (all-time)?

Jim DeLorenzo: Joe Klecko

Josh Feinberg: Favorite Team to Follow?

Jim DeLorenzo: New York Jets

Josh Feinberg: Who do you have winning tourney?

Jim DeLorenzo: Being a graduate, I have to go with Duke

I suggest a return to basics.
1) How do we make money?
2) Who are the best prospects for making money?
3) what do these people value?
4) where do they “live”?
5) how can we best get our message to them?
6) once they come to us how do we convert them to customers?

It is always important to sell your company as a part of the individual or corporation that you are trying to reach.  If you only care about sending out your company’s message without fine tuning it towards your audience, then you probably won’t have much luck no matter what profession you are in.  And in today’s day and age, if you want to compete with the best, I suggest learning a bit about online marketing through social networks and Web 2.0 opportunities.

• SBJ loves itself some Octagon [Octagon Named 'Sports Agency of the Year' by Sports Business Journal].
• Busy week for D-Mac…he was out house hunting while his agent secured him $26 million guaranteed [McFadden agrees to six-year, $60 million deal with Raiders].
• Seems like the Cowboys got T.O. at a bargain price [Cowboys give Owens new 4-year, $34 million deal].
• The Bengals locked up a rare diamond in their large rough [Big deal for Big Willie means more than big money].
• WMG’s 2008 NBA roster is starting to look straight-up scary [Augustin hires agent].
• O.J. Mayo expected to sign with Leon Rose next week [Word on the Street: Workouts, Trade Rumors Heat Up].
• Kevin Love is already thinking 401(k)s [The Love of Money].
• Tiger Woods is really, really, really wealthy [SI.com - The Fortunate 50].
• She’s hot, and her wrist is now icy [Ivanovic Signs With Rolex].
• It’s too bad I don’t own Deadspin.com [Top 50 Most Valuable Sports Social Networks According to dnScoop].
• Paul DePodesta has a blog…if you read Moneyball, you know exactly who I am talking about [It Might Be Dangerous... You Go First].

When will the social network bubble burst? Has it already been popped? I do not really know anybody who uses any social friending site other than Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or possibly Plaxo, on a frequent basis. That surely has not deterred CAA, MLB Advanced Media, and a company called Pequot Ventures to form a new youth sports social network. WePlay.com is geared towards athletes between the ages of 6-16, their parents, and their coaches.

WePlay.com’s mission: to enable and enhance the joy of sports for kids, families, coaches and fans both online and on the field. What the hell does that mean? Oh wait…read down a couple of paragraphs on the press release: young athletes can create profiles, blogs and fan clubs, play games, connect with friends and create a highlight reel. How innovative! Children are already doing all of this on MySpace.

Their business platform is to find revenue in advertisements on the WePlay.com site (how innovative…sarcasm). It seems like 5,000 new social networks sprout up every day with this same goal in mind. Create a social network for a niche group of people, don’t make them pay to be members, and make money off of advertisements. My guess is that most of the sites fizzle out after making pennies. Why do CAA, MLB Advanced Media and this Pequot group believe that WePlay.com will be any different?

For one, Derek Jeter, Peyton Manning, LeBron James, and Tony Parker are among its athlete founders. Will the endorsement of those athletes and whatever equity they have in the venture be enough to make it successful? It seems that their backing has allowed WePlay.com to generate a bunch of buzz thus far, even making a story on SportsAgentBlog.com! But what about longterm? When the hype dies in a week, will the site survive?

It definitely has strong financial backing behind it. The site has already been financed with $4.5 million dollars. Personally, I do not care how much money you have behind something, if the idea stinks and is not innovative, it is destined to fail (or at least not be profitable). Like my colleague Jason Peck over at Take a Peck, I took WePlay.com for a short test drive. I understand that it is only in Beta, but I was thoroughly unimpressed. I agree with Jason, it is early on in the game for WePlay.com and I should wait a little while before I get too critical. But from what I see as their mission and their original product, I think this is a wrong move by all parties involved in its success (however, there is no loss to the athletes that do not invest any money into it).