Duke embraces social media

Editor’s note: This is the third and final portion of a three-part series spotlighting the impact of social networking and new media on college athletics, particularly basketball. Tuesday’s focus was on current players [1], while Wednesday’s piece discussed Kyrie Irving’s recruiting process [2]. Today, The Chronicle looks into the ways Duke uses the Internet to determine the tone of content related to the basketball program.

When Kentucky head coach John Calipari has something to say to fans, he tweets. With 942,550 Twitter followers and counting, the Internet serves as a platform for an already storied program, giving it an online presence in a new age of social media.

Using the micro-blogging site, the Wildcats can communicate directly with fans without relying on traditional media outlets to tell their story.

“Calipari is an animal [on Twitter and] with recruiting,” said Seth Davis, a CBS college basketball analyst and former Chronicle sports columnist. “He’s got close to a million followers and [as a coach] you want to be relevant, current, reach people where they live.”

While Calipari uses Twitter as a starting point for his other content available online—he posted a link to a live chat with fans from the site as recently as Tuesday—the Duke program uses its Duke Blue Planet website as its base on the Internet. 

Duke Blue Planet is a site maintained by the Blue Devil program that showcases the Duke basketball team, its players and coaches.

Both associate head coach Chris Collins and Duke Blue Planet are active on Twitter, but the two have just 2,446 and 3,011 followers, respectively. Head coach Mike Krzyzewski has no presence on Twitter save for a fake account with his namesake (@MikeKrzyzewski) whose only two updates are “I could eat cheese for every meal” and “how else can i explain that calipari’s a little bitch?”

That isn’t to say, though, that the Blue Devils are not active on the Internet. In addition to the Duke Blue Planet website, the program has a channel on YouTube. The video entitled “Great Moments in Cinematic History,” in which players reenact scenes from movies including “Titanic” and “The Godfather,” has 43,915 views. Additional interviews and videos with players humanize a team that, to outsiders, can sometimes appear standoffish.

For the Blue Devils, interacting with fans on the Internet was a project that grew out of necessity. By the end of the 2006-2007 season, the negative attention surrounding the program, according to recruiting coordinator Dave Bradley, had become unbearable. The Blue Devils had gone 22-11, lost in the first round of the ACC Tournament and fizzled out early in the NCAA Tournament at the hands of Virginia Commonwealth. The media’s critical coverage, even if it was fair, sure wasn’t bolstering Duke Basketball’s reputation.

“The haters were out in full force, and it was taking its toll on our guys,” Bradley said. “It was the worst I’ve ever seen it in terms of all the negative articles, the stories. More than just negative, just pure hate, it was just strong. There were a lot of people telling our story well, too, but we didn’t have a voice.”

Just over two years since the Duke Blue Planet website launched, the Duke Department of Athletics maintains that its Internet presence has been effective.

“I think there’s been less Duke hate, so to speak,” associate athletic director for communications Jon Jackson told The Chronicle in February. “It’s still out there. For us to say it’s just going to magically disappear is probably not the best strategy on our part. It’s something you have to work at consistently, and one of the key ways to do that is through Blue Planet.”

Recruiting and the Internet

Before YouTube and email, a college coach hearing rumors about an amazing recruit playing in a cramped gym at some far-flung location would have to make the difficult decision of whether or not to dedicate a few days to see the prodigy. It was recruiting by hearsay.

Now, those days are as antiquated as teams taking the train for West Coast road swings. In today’s new age of recruiting, players can simply upload videos showing off their skills onto YouTube or, better yet, email the clips to coaches across the country. The availability of footage makes the recruiter a little less road-weary, but the excess of information coming in takes time to sift through. “We get email and people mailing us DVDs,” Bradley said. “We probably get, over the course of the year, 500 [people contacting us], at least, whether it’s a coach or a player or a parent. But the major conference programs on a given year are only going to look to bring in between one and five in a class.”

Hasheem Thabeet—the second pick of last year’s NBA Draft and a current member of the Memphis Grizzlies—would have had a hard time catching the attention of college coaches without the capabilities provided by new technology. 

“He was in Tanzania and he went into an Internet café in Dar es Salaam and just started emailing American colleges,” recruiting analyst Adam Zagoria said. “It kind of makes the world a smaller place and enables people from all around the world to make themselves known.”

While the new breakthroughs allow talented players to take the recruiting process into their own hands, it is unlikely that recruiting will ever be done completely online. After all, there are some things in the process that simply have to be done in person.

“You don’t get a feel of what a person is like until you sit across a table from him,” new media expert Paul Levinson said. “You also get something more from going to a game. In the future, the Internet will be an important, growing ingredient in recruiting, but it will not be all of recruiting.”

Recruits will still take their on-campus visits, and no matter how widespread the sport’s Internet presence becomes, the games will still be played on the hardwood. But for a program looking to stay current, social media has emerged as an essential tool.