By Denny O'Brien
©2010 Bonesville.net
All Rights Reserved.

At its very core, social media was established as an asylum for you and me to congregate on the information superhighway.

And today it remains an Internet playground where old friends can renew relationships, old flames can be rekindled, and new connections can be formed. It's a collaborative environment in which the requirements for membership are few, save for a keyboard, monitor, and Internet connection.

With those in tow, you can access a buffet of social networking sites that seem to cover every relational niche imaginable.

Want to connect with old friends in high school and keep close tabs on current ones? Head on over to Facebook.

Think the world is interested in a play-by-play of your daily activities? Sign up for twitter.

Need to show videos of Junior's first steps to the grandparents? Post them on YouTube.

The list of sites is seemingly endless, and so are the hours that we spend sharing our thoughts on the World Wide Blogosphere.

As the social media craze evolved, the mainstream media began to understand its value. In a business where there is growing pressure to deliver the scoop first, social media, specifically twitter, has become an invaluable tool for quick information delivery.

If you've ever wondered why journalists – be they of the print, electronic, or broadcast variety – often use twitter to break a story, the answer is simple. The time it takes to fire a scooping tweet versus delivering copy to a publisher is like comparing the 100-meter dash to the Boston Marathon.

And today's media is much more of a sprint.

With the advent of social media, the sports media is quickly learning that the sources we sometimes rely on for inside information are occasionally beating us to the punch. That's because they have multiple online forums in which they can communicate such news to their cyber colony of friends.

That occurred not too long ago at East Carolina when former Pirates' coach Skip Holtz jumped ship for Tampa. Instead of a beat writer or broadcast personality breaking Holtz's final decision, the news came via a player's twitter account from within the closed-door team meeting.

One week later, it was a player who settled conflicting media reports about Holtz's replacement when he tweeted about his meeting with new coach Ruffin McNeill. That alone should raise concerns within the athletics department about how student-athletes are using social media.

Those connected to ECU athletes in a social media capacity can attest to the breadth of information you can learn about them. Some of it is good, some isn't.

By following a student-athlete on twitter, you can gain an appreciation of team unity. Witnessing athletes strengthening relationships via cyberspace provides evidence that these guys (and gals) stay connected far beyond the locker room.

That's a good thing. But not everything you learn from a student-athlete's tweet or Facebook status is.

Unflattering descriptions of university professors, proclamations of skipping class, and the occasional four-letter word are just a few examples of what you can also read if you are a follower. You might even come across someone lashing out at fans for their criticism over a recent performance.

In other words, social media can show an unflattering side of college athletics, East Carolina included.

So how should athletics departments respond to student-athletes and their use of social media? Should coaches and administrators simply turn a blind eye, or establish some hard and fast rules?

Iowa chose the latter after photographs of two 19-year old football players hoisting cash and liquor bottles were posted on Facebook. Administrators wisely implemented a monitoring policy to help ensure that no content is posted that might reflect negatively on the student-athlete or the institution.

Should that occur, consequences follow.

Iowa isn't alone. Ohio State, North Carolina, Iowa State, Auburn, and many others also have developed monitoring policies that include repercussions for misuse.

This should become the norm for any institution that participates in major college athletics. University administrators have a duty to protect their image, not to mention an obligation to uphold the ideals on which their school was built.

Student-athletes are expected to behave in a way that doesn't compromise those when they are in public, and the same should apply to social media. There are too many examples of significant damage occurring in 140 characters or less.