There's been a lot of posting recently among the Women Talk Sports crowd about the power of social networking for women's sports. My contribution is an observation I made early on in my Twitter tenure that has continued to cross my mind from time to time. I had always sworn never to use the service, thinking of it as the last frontier in self-absorption and oversharing, until the day I found out that a friend, a smart, balanced friend whom I respected, loved it. She saw the 140 character limit as a challenge in creating pithy and interesting updates. I checked her feed. It didn't sound like 'woke up, ate a muffin, brushed teeth, caught BART.' She mused and asked questions. This was the part of Facebook I'd never liked, the idea that you have to write a status update about something you're doing rather than something you're thinking. I signed up.

I quickly discovered the other, more popular and more unexpected (by the developers) aspect of Twitter: the presence of people in the public eye whom one might follow. Twitter became an important blogging resource by enabling me to follow pro athletes and sports journalists. Also politicians, Web 2.0 theorists, and Sarah Haskins. From at the beginning I noticed that my numbers were skewed heavily toward women. Even now when things have become more balanced, 48 of the 72 people I follow are women (two-thirds). Initially I wondered if it was just my own selection bias. But Kara Swisher reported back from a tech conference that users of Twitter were running female in large percentages. I also found a graphic representation on a sports social media site, that aggregated the tweets of pro athletes and showed their pictures in a grid. Ten-ish for Major League Baseball, ten-ish for the NHL..then the page exploded with images for the WNBA. There is no question that more female athletes are tweeting than male athletes.

From a sports perspective, this is women taking advantage of a niche that can't be exploited by men because the downside is too large. Male athletes make a lot of money, have important sponsorships and are well-known worldwide. Many of them are also immature and volatile, which makes broadcasting their every thought to the world a problem. A number of men's pro sports leagues and college teams have already restricted or banned Twitter. Meanwhile, women's sports are embracing it because what they need is exposure, and they thrive on the personal connection between athlete and fan. They've thus far avoided any major controversy. Although it's only a matter of time before a percentage of the athletes lodge foot firmly in mouth, the benefits outweigh the potential cost in this particular balance.

I think there's another reason, though, which is more connected to the way our culture views women and the way we're taught to socialize (NOT inherent differences between the sexes, I might add). 'What are you doing?' is the question asked by someone who has called to talk, to be informed about what's going on at that moment in your life. Prolix pronouncements, where you bang on about your personal philosophy, are impossible. The perception is that Twitter is chatty, which is a mode of communication linked with femininity in our culture. I don't think men see it as acceptable to document their time in chatty ways. The balance is probably shifting now, since it has become clear that Twitter is a useful PR and business tool (which is why, despite low rates of returning regular-person users, it's probably going to continue to be successful). However its initial appeal was to the virtue of keeping connected, long the province of women. It makes perfect sense that female athletes, as a subset of the population of women, would embrace this technology first: many of them travel away from family and friends and are looking for new, more immediate forms of communication, and they also understand the importance of building personal relationships with fans and athletes from other sports. The small, quotidian aspect of the service would make sense to them since those are things women are taught to value. They are certainly aspects of Twitter that I enjoy, getting glimpses into the daily world both of friends and of people I find inspiring or informed. Most people I meet don't really get Twitter, but that's often a function of knowing the caricature rather than the thing itself. There will always be a crucial place for long-form thought, but Twitter has tremendous potential to make connections.

View Original Post at ftlouie.typepad.com/womensports

• Filed Under:  
• SportsPLUS, OpEd, Technology, Media/Marketing

• Tags:
• Twitter
• women and sports
• social media

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Lisa Creech Bledsoe

Fascinating take on Twitter, as it relates to women's sports in particular. There are clear gender differences on Twitter, as this recent report from a Harvard Business blog shows: http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/06/new_twitter_research_men_follo.html

I agree that Twitter has great potential for helping women make connections. And maybe we can help create change that way as well.

Monday, November 2, 2009 at 10:03am PST