Tom Crean's Backfiring Tweet and What We Can Learn From It

Indiana head coach Tom Crean opened a can of worms with his recent tweet.

Poor Tom Crean and Indiana University's PR Department. All they wanted was to try to get fans involved and closer to the team.

So some back story first: Indiana University is one of the proudest college basketball programs in the nation, but one that has fallen on tough times lately (the team did not even make the NIT Tournament this year). Fans have grown tired of this and are beginning to sour on the team's head coach, Tom Crean.

Back to the present day. Tom Crean, who in the past has said that he doesn't read replies on Twitter (red flag right there), tweeted the following out to his 138,000+ followers:

So innocent. So simple. But left wide open for trolls.

Seems innocent enough. It's even a great idea, a way for fans to feel a part of their favorite team and try to inspire them daily. Unfortunately, this is the age of the Internet, and trolls thrive on things like this like never before.

Responses came in quickly to Crean's tweet, but none of them were what the team at Indiana was expecting. Most people brought up the team's recent poor play. Others took shots at the coach himself. Take, for example, @RealPhilS, who said that playing for Indiana meant "TO BE VERY TALENTED BUT HAVE YOUR SH*TTY COACH F*CK UP YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING" (On a related note, @RealPhilS should read this comic on typing in all-caps). More examples of responses can be seen here.

My fear from this response is that teams and schools will stop doing things like this altogether, which is the opposite of what they should do. Much like a white paper I recently helped write for class, schools needs to teach everyone, from their student-athletes to those who coach them, the proper way to use social media and how to respond to situations like this. And no, ignoring them is not the correct answer.

So what can we learn from Indiana's mistakes?

• Know your fan base 

Indiana is coming off a 17-15 (7-11 Big Ten) season that saw them fail to make a postseason tournament.. For a team with such a prestigious history, that is not a good season Fans are not exactly going to be in the happiest of moods right now. Therefore, it's probably not the best time to ask such an open-ended question on a site like Twitter, where trolls lurk around every corner just waiting for an opportunity like this.

• Take the good with the bad

Unfortunately, as Alfred in the movie 'The Dark Knight' pointed out, "some men just want to watch the world burn." Regardless of what you do or say, some commentators to online posts will always troll and post negative things. Do not let that discourage you from trying to interact with your fans and readers though. The loudest ones are often the minority.

• Develop a social media strategy beforehand

 It is best to develop a strategy beforehand of what you will post, when you will post it and how you will respond to both positive and negative responses to that post. I am sure that Indiana had a plan when they had Crean post the tweet (because I have trouble believing someone who has so openly criticized Twitter in the past would come up with this idea on his own), but I do not think they executed it as well as they could have. It may have been better to have the school's official Twitter account post the question as opposed to Crean's account. But every mistake is a chance to learn, and I am sure that Indiana and Crean have learned plenty from the tweet.

Twitter Bringing Fans into the Recruiting Process

Social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter are marvelous creations, giving people unprecedented access to their favorite celebrities, teams and athletes. Unfortunately, this means that fans now risk getting too close to athletes, to the point that it may become detrimental to their favorite collegiate team.

Above, we see a screenshot of a tweet sent by Courtney Pastner, the sister of the University of Memphis head coach Josh Pastner, to Rodney Purvis, who at the time was being recruited by the Tigers. As innocent and harmless as the tweet seems, it could actually be considered an NCAA recruiting violation.

As Yahoo! Sports blog Prep Rally wrote, "there is no doubt that the younger Pastner is making public, direct contact with a recruit via social media, something which would be a clear violation if Pastner was doing so himself. The question is whether Courtney Pastner is 'someone affiliated with the Memphis institution.' Considering her relationship with her brother and her understandably open pro-Memphis bent (see her Twitter background above, for instance), Prep Rally is inclined to say that she should be tabbed as someone connected with the Tigers."

On Twitter, fans do not seem to know where the fine line between appropriate and inappropriate lies, and will often cross the line in an attempt to attract an athlete to their favorite school. ESPN highlighted Tyler Luatua, the No. 3tight end prospect in the Class of 2013, in a recent article, who had a Twitter user tell him, "Come to (Southern California), or I will kill myself."
"He eventually said he was just kidding," Luatua said. "He said he's got kids at home and would never do that, but I thought he was serious at first. That really freaked me out."

"Twitter is the Wild West of recruiting," Adoree' Jackson, a recruit out of California, told ESPN in the article. "I've had some weird things tweeted at me, crazy things. Some I can't say. It does get to the point where fans will tell you, 'If you come to my school, I'll give you this.' 'I'll throw a party for you.' 'I'll name my kid after you,' and stuff like that."

Coaches had enough to worry about before when it came to recruiting just from opposing teams' coaches. Today, they also have to worry about fans from their own school (or even another school) saying something that could influence a recruit's opinion and the possible NCAA sanctions that could come from such an action.

Worst of all for fans, their words often fall upon deaf ears.

"This is my life and not theirs," recruit Cameron Robinson out of Louisiana told ESPN. "I would be a fool to listen to what some person I never met before says, especially some crazy fan on Twitter."
The lesson to be learned from all this? Fans should leave the recruiting to the coaches.