Sports and Social Media: Where Opportunity and Fear Collide

"There has been no shortage of stories on athletes using Twitter (Twitter) and social media to further their personal agendas.

On the flip side, we’ve also seen the organizations behind the professional sports leagues, and the media outlets covering them, struggle between their desire to understand and embrace social media and their fear of losing control of their entertainment properties.

Athletes and their representatives, coaches, staff members, and media analysts all pose a threat to the status quo. Cincinnati Bengals Wide Receiver Chad Ochocinco’s in-game tweets could mean that fans follow him over watching the television interview, Andy Roddick’s tennis tweets could reveal insider information, the ESPN analysts’ tweets on sports stories could attract off-camera discussion; the bottom line is that control of the message is slipping away with Twitter as a medium. It’s this fear of losing control that is driving organizations to restrict what gets said in a social media space."

Sports and Social Media: Where Opportunity and Fear Collide

Meet Seth the blogger guy, AT&T's answer to angry iPhone owners - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Brainstorm Tech

"We have heard you. We are on it."

So says the Seth Bloom — a.k.a. Seth the blogger guy — the geeky talking head that AT&T (T) has sent out to do damage control in the face of rising outrage among Apple (AAPL) iPhone users about the quality of AT&T's service, particularly in urban areas like San Francisco and New York.

(See for example Wednesday's New York Times, which dubbed the data-guzzling iPhone 'the Hummer of cellphones.')"

Meet Seth the blogger guy, AT&T's answer to angry iPhone owners - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Brainstorm Tech

Fox's Fringe "Twitter on TV" Experiment Irks Fans

"Last week we reported on what sounded like a cool experiment to mix social media with television. Fox's idea of "tweet-peats" would combine reruns of popular new shows Fringe and Glee, with producers and members of the cast tweeting their show commentary as the episodes rolled.

Unfortunately, the promising experiment went off the rails because of the implementation. Zatz Not Funny caught a screengrab of the resulting interface (shown at right), with the TwitterTwitterTwitter commentary showing up smack on top of the lower third of the screen, obscuring the action of the show (and Anna Torv’s face! Oh the humanity)."

Fox’s Fringe “Twitter on TV” Experiment Irks Fans

HOW TO: Use Twitter’s Advanced Search Features

"There’s an astonishing amount of information to be gleaned from mining the amazing real-time stream of information Twitter (Twitter) provides. Twitter search (tweetzi Twitter Search) is an extremely powerful way of turning up some of those answers. Even using only plain text queries can turn up lots of valuable information about what people are talking about right now.

But you can go even deeper than plain text queries. They’re not too well publicized, so it’s all too easy to forget they even exist. We wanted to jog your memories and highlight a few of the cool advanced operators that can help you turn up sometimes surprising results."

HOW TO: Use Twitter’s Advanced Search Features