The Tendo View

When Charlie Villanueva, a basketball player with the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, decided to tweet from the team’s locker room during halftime of a March game against the Celtics, a cry was heard across the land. What was he thinking? Why wasn’t his mind on basketball? His own coach said it gave the impression that the player wasn’t focused.

The tweet in question read, “In da locker room, snuck to post my twit. We’re playing the Celtics, tie ball game at da half. Coach wants more toughness. I gotta step up.”

Still, there are several things working in Villanueva’s favor. First is that he did step up, scoring 11 of his 19 points in the fourth quarter as his team upset the defending NBA champions.

Next is the fact that sending a tweet at halftime is not so essentially different than a sideline TV interview, done as the player makes his way to the locker room.

Finally there’s the Shaq factor.

Never one to pass up the opening moments of a trend, less than a week later Phoenix center Shaquille O’Neal dropped word (via Twitter, of course) that he was planning something similar during halftime of his upcoming game against Washington.

Sure enough, he came through with this: “Shhhhhhh.”

That O’Neal suffered no repercussions (his coach, Alvin Gentry, also tweets) is probably a sign of things to come. Tweets from baseball players between innings. Tweets from football players between possessions. Tweets from golfers pretty much any time.

The lesson here is one of accessibility, of giving your audience (or your customers) what they want. Debates about an athlete’s in-game focus will always have a place at the table, but so long as the NBA—or Charlie Villanueva or Shaquille O’Neal—is more popular now than it was a month ago, even a die-hard traditionalist must admit there’s some merit to the practice.

O’Neal was among the league’s most popular players before Twitter ever existed. Now he reportedly has more than 471,000 followers and plays Twitter tag, wherein he tells people where he is at any given moment and offers game tickets to the first person to find him.

Could any marketer come up with a better program?