It seems like it's every week now a news story hits the wire about coaches warning against the ills of social media and all negative light a Twitter account can shine on a player.
If you haven't seen a tweet like this one below yourself, you certainly no someone who has:
This isn't to single out Herb Hand or to say football staffs are wrong for railing against the downside of social media. But there are two sides to every coin, and just as Twitter can ruin a career, it can also build one completely out of nowhere.
Case in point: Bryan Donaldson.
Donaldson was a 40-year-old IT professional in Peoria, Illinois, living the type of life you'd expect a 40-year-old IT professional to live. He opened a Twitter account in 2011 and started tweeting jokes he couldn't say at work or at home. People started taking notice. Lots of them, in fact. His account (@TheNardvark) has more than 40,000 followers, and among them was Late Night with Seth Meyers head writer and producer Alex Blaze. In looking to hire a writing staff for the new NBC late-night talk show, Blaze kept a list of his 20 favorite tweeters. Donaldson eventually rose to No. 3, so Blaze showed Donaldson's account to Meyers and fellow producer Mike Shoemaker.
Donaldson had no writing resume and zero experience in show business, but had proved himself day after day in the meritocracy of the Twitter comedy world. “If I go to somebody’s Twitter, I can see what he’s been doing the last two years — you get a much more complete sense of how he writes," Blaze told Vulture. "It’s like you get to flip through somebody’s comedy notebook.”
Donaldson's complete lack of experience was irrelevant to Meyers. Funny is funny, whether or not it has a New York agent. “We never stopped to wonder where he was from or what he was doing,” Meyers said. “He just made us laugh.”
Donaldson got the job, and now works as a full-time writer for a major New York comedy show.
What's a football coach to learn from this? A lot, actually.
- Established coaches love to tell both recruits and younger coaches that every tweet is a job interview, but that's just as true for them. It's true for all of us, actually. You never know who's reading your tweets.
- We've said this before, but if you aren't showing off your personality in your tweets, you are wasting your time. It's tough to prove your Xs and Os knowledge 140 characters at a time, but coaches time and again say schematic knowledge is secondary to personality in the first place. People want to hire people they'll get along with, that fit in and that gel with the existing group, and that's true in all walks of life. That should be your goal with every tweet.
- Looking at it from the opposite end of the table, Donaldson didn't have the credentials to work on a late-night talk show, but it didn't matter. In fact, his outsider status to the New York-Los Angeles showbiz bubble actually worked in his favor. He was the right fit because he was the right fit. That's all that mattered.
Twitter is a powerful tool, for ill, yes, but just as powerful for good. Showcase your personality, and the possibilities are limitless. Remember that the next time you're watching late-night comedy.