Sports and social media

Continuing with a sports motif… Catch the Redskins game last night? Former Baltimore Raven and now Washington Redskin, Billy Cundiff, missed three field goals before kicking a game winner in the last few seconds of the game. You might wonder what this has to do with social media – actually, quite a lot.

Billy Cundiff missed a critical field goal for the Ravens last year during the playoffs and the entire city turned against him. His teammates were the first people to speak out in his defense. Ray Lewis was quoted as saying, “We win as a team, we lose as a team.” That did little to stop the horrible tweets, Facebook posts and other social media insults and threats.

Using social media for good instead of evil, should be our goal. Focus on what the kicker did in the last play of the game and not threaten his life.

Sometimes it is best to keep your opinions to yourself. This is especially true if you are trying to grow your business and use your social media to do that. You never know who is reading your posts or how they feel about any given situation.

There was an interview with baseball sportscaster Joe Buck on TV last night. He also received negative tweets and was reading them on his phone during the games. He said it affected the way he did his job. He had to stop using Twitter to keep his peace of mind. Are you driving people away from social media with negative comments? Let’s hope not!

Iran has blocked certain websites from that country, although they have unblocked gmail today. We live in a wonderful, free society and to take that freedom and use it to heckle, harass and browbeat people is wrong.

Let’s try and have some good karma. Think of at least one nice thing to tweet or post on Google+ , LinkedIn or Facebook