When talking about social media, it’s really important to talk about the things that were going on before its advent. Social media, when it came along, allowed us to do several things. Prior to this, there were many more cases of an athlete or athletic organization or any given event going directly to a media entity, who would then deliver it directly to the consumers.
Before the advent of social media, there wasn’t much direct communication to the consumer from the organization, the athlete or the event. There was always an entity in the middle. This caused a number of different issues. Consumers did not understand what was actually going on from the point of view of the athlete or the sports organization. It also created inauthentic news stories, especially involving athletic teams.
Often, consumers were left wondering what was really going on. Additionally, the content providers were receiving publicity from the mass media entities. So it’s interesting to note that before the advent of social media, the audience members themselves weren’t the ones giving publicity to organizations, or athletes, or events. The publicity was actually coming from places like ESPN, Fox or a newspaper or radio station.
Prior to social media, there were three main entities involved in sports publicity. This includes the content providers, the mass media organizations and a mass audience. The content providers were either the sports organizations, the athletes, or the events. It could be the Dallas Cowboys. It could be Michael Jordan. Or it could be the New York City Marathon.
At the time, content providers couldn’t reach out to the audience directly. Instead, they had to go through some type of mass media entity. Any given sports entity, whether it be Michael Jordan or the Cowboys or the NYC Marathon, had to distribute their message. To do so, they would first go to a television station like a Fox Sports, an ESPN, an NBC or a CBS. They would repeat this message in additional media, including local radio entities, newspapers or magazines. It was then up to that newspaper or magazine or TV channel to pass that information on to the mass audience.
Unfortunately, this created a thirdhand message. The issue was that these athletes and organizations and events weren’t actually giving their information directly to the consumers. Instead, they were getting it to them through a medium. So once social media started to be implemented, there was this whole new understanding and wealth of information that came from direct-to-consumer communication. There was no longer any sort of middleman that the consumers had to rely on and trust to know what they wanted to know.
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