Twitter

Last month, Charlie Villanueva, forward of the Milwaukee Bucks, posted the following Tweet:

In da locker room, snuck to post my twitt. We’re playing the Celtics, tie ball game at da half. Coach wants more toughness. I gotta step up.

This was during the halftime of a critical NBA Game. As you can imagine, the Bucks Coach Scott Skiles didn’t find this very amusing and told his players that he doesn’t want it to happen again because he sees this as a lack of professionalism. It’s not rare seeing players giving interviews during breaks or at the halftime of a game. Sending out a Twitter takes a few seconds while giving an interview usually takes much longer. That’s why I don’t agree with Skiles and I think players should be allowed to do it. Twittering during a game can certainly bring live action to a new level. Knowing what players think during games can be very interesting for people watching at home. Wouldn’t it be exciting to see tweets of players sitting on the bench on your TV screen next to the score of the game?

He isn’t the only NBA player using Twitter. Shaquille O’Neal is without a doubt one of the most popular NBA players having a Twitter account. His screen name is THE_REAL_SHAQ. He joined Twitter because an imposter was using his name to interact with his fans. After 1221 tweets, he’s still at it and thinks that Twitter is a fun way to interact with his fans. This experience of Shaquille O’Neal fans shows that it is indeed the real Shaq who is posting on Twitter numerous times a day. After the Villanova-incident, Shaq vowed to post a tweet at halftime without getting into trouble and that’s exactly what he did with the following Tweet:

Through that whole story, Twitter got some mainstream media attention. For a more complete list of NBA players on Twitter, head over to Socialmediasports.com created by the Twitter user NBAplayers. Other NBA players will probably never be on Twitter like Charles Barkley who chose to call people on Twitter a “bunch of losers”. The NBA also has a couple of official Twitter accounts:  “NBA” and  “NBA TV”. They are updated pretty often and can be an interesting resource for NBA fans.

Widgets

It is also really easy to post content from NBA.com on other sites, blogs and social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, …) with the widgets the NBA is offering.  Here’s an example:

There are a lot of widgets to chose from. I would have loved to have that possibility 10 years back when i created my first fan web pages on Geocities (RIP). Nowadays, this is nothing revolutionary anymore but we’ve come a long way from 1998. The NBA is doing a great job with exporting their content on other sites which gives them a better visibility.

Blogging

On the official NBA site, you can find a lot of blogs by experts, players and fans. The blogs of players, which are probably the most interesting for readers, aren’t updated very often though. Gilbert Arenas’ Blog for example is very fun to read but his last post dates back to November 2008. Other players have their blogs on their official site instead of having it on NBA.com. Dwight Howard has been very active these last weeks, especially since the playoffs started. He has used his blog, as well as his Facebook and Twitter pages to communicate with his fans. Another blog I recommend is Marc Cuban’s blog, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and entrepreneur. He’s been blogging for over 5 years now and often has interesting posts. If you’re looking for blogs of other NBA players or experts, head over to Hoopshype.com, a site with a lot of news and features about the NBA.

Facebook

The NBA is also on Facebook and has over 820 000 fans. The page is updated very often with new videos, pictures or just notifications. As an active Facebook user and NBA.com visitor, i really like that they post random short videos that you can watch without losing too much time. People in the discussion forums are also very active.

The NBA is promoting their brand really well through Facebook which is probably one of their main objectives. Communicating with the fans and letting them participate on their Facebook page by commenting and discussing is also an important factor. They also try to sell their products indirectly through Facebook by posting pictures of some featured products like you can see on the picture above.

Wiki

There are nearly 6000 articles on the Basketball wiki Hoopedia. Apart from articles that the NBA determines to be factually accurate, any content can be added and edited like for every other wiki. It’s a great resource for information about Basketball al over the world, not just the NBA.

Conclusion

All in all, I think that the NBA is doing a really good job at using social media to communicate with their fans. They have understood that they don’t need to have everything on their official site and are present on the main social networks and Twitter. The content on their different pages is updated very often and they are successful because many people are participating by commenting, putting NBA widgets on their site or blog and editing articles on Hoopedia.