Professional athletes tweeting. It's a curious and interesting phenomenon that deserves more than a little credit for helping to bring many people to Twitter and other forms of social media. Shaquille O'Neal. Lance Armstrong. Terrell Owens. Chad Ochocinco. Kevin Durant. Charlie Villanueva. Paul Pierce. They all have made headlines via their tweets. And, today, we have another very curious and interesting case: Steve Johnson of the Buffalo Bills.

Johnson, a wide receiver and no stranger to tweeting, went from a pitied soul to, many will say, a pathetic one after tweeting about his dropping a potentially game-winning touchdown pass in overtime Sunday against the Pittsburgh Steelers. Addressing the media after the game, Johnson all but admirably took responsibility for letting his team down. But when he had more time to think about it, well, he reacted by apparently blaming God for his mishap.

"I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!!" the 24-year-old tweeted from his iPad at around 5:15 Sunday, about an hour after Steelers' 19-16 victory, according to the New York Daily News. "AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO ..."

Like I said, athletes sharing their thoughts in 140 characters or less is not new. Jon Parks founded the website Athletes Who Tweet in April 2009 because he was amused by the interest and controversy Twitter was causing in professional sports. So the die-hard sports fan developed his site to allow sports fans to find their favorite athlete on Twitter. There's also the website Tweeting-Athletes.com, a directory created, it says so itself, because "it wasn't easy to find professional athletes on Twitter, other than the real obvious (Shaq, Lance, Tony, etc.)."

Used effectively, athletes can use tweets to weigh in on matters in short-and-sweet fashion and have it reported instantly worldwide. Shaq did so, for example, when he congratulated Kobe Bryant after the Los Angeles Lakers won another NBA championship in June. But Johnson's case is Exhibit A of how to heap infamy upon infamy. Not only will he long be remembered for dropping that pass, but now he will be a laughingstock for blaming God on Twitter.

Paraphrasing Johnson himself, FOLKS WILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!!

No Emerging Media class this week as it's the start of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Which means I get to stay home and start to focus on catching up on overdue assignments – and to begin thinking in earnest about a course I'll be teaching next semester. The course is Introduction to Digital Storytelling (JOUR 1550), for all intents and purposes the undergraduate-level version of our graduate-level Craft of Digital Storytelling class. I'm really excited to get to teach JOUR 1550 and feel much better prepared having taken the graduate course and our Emerging Media course, too. Professor Menck has provided several great guest speakers and even more documents and sites for our learning.

Still, needed to decide which books, if any, to use to teach JOUR 1550. Carole Burns showed me "Online Journalism: Principles and Practices of News for the Web," by James C. Foust. I think I will be able to make that work. Searching the Internet led me to another book, "The Digital Journalist's Handbook," by Mark S. Luckie. He describes himself as a digital journalist who combines his love for journalism with his passion for technology. I will use his book as well.

What really impressed me is Luckie's blog, 10,000 Words, which he created as a resource for journalists and web and technology enthusiasts to learn the tools that are shaping digital journalism. I came across the blog while looking for someone else's account on Twitter – and saw that the 10,000 Words account has 12,725 followers. I quickly added myself to that number and will spend a lot of time reviewing all the previous posts, archives and useful sites offered. (Check out How Mark Luckie Created 'The Digital Journalist's Handbook' from another blog.)

Here's his latest post: 5 myths about digital journalism. His list includes 1) journalists must know everything, 2) social media is the answer, 3) journalists must have database development skills, 4) comments suck/comments are essential for democracy and 5) there are no journalism jobs. He ends the last item by saying: "All hope is not lost, though. Make sure you set yourself apart from the pack by developing diverse and unique skills (which don't always have to be digital). If you're unemployed, use the opportunity to learn or develop independent projects that demonstrate your ongoing commitment to journalism." Sounds like excellent advice for my students.

Well, then, that was 94 words from Luckie. Now, only 9,906 more to go!

UPDATE (December 1): Walked into Diederich College Dean Lori Bergen's office today and saw this book, "Producing Online News: Digital Skills, Stronger Stories," resting on her desk. It's by Ryan M. Thornburg, a University of North Carolina professor. This definitely has possibilities for my class. Thornburg also has his own blog, Producing Online News. His latest post offers a sample syllabus called, Producing Online News. OMG!

This is Entrepreneurial Week at Marquette and in conjunction with that our Emerging Media guest speaker tonight was Justin Beck, co-founder and CEO of PerBlue, a profitable small business building mobile and social games in Madison, Wis. The company site says Beck is a passional software entrepreneur who began programming at age 12, graduated from the University of Wisconsin, where he studied computer engineering and computer science.

Beck, who is unquestionably mature beyond his 23 years, offered more pearls of wisdom that can be shared here. Right off the bat, he told us, our goal should be productize our value. Then we won't be bound by how much time we have on this earth, but instead we would bound only by how much we can distribute it.

Explaining why he is willing to move from company to company if he feels it's right: "We all want really good first days. ... But what's really important is to have really great last days." He doesn't condone work-a-holicism. "The real key is when you work lots of hours you cannot do really cool stuff." He added that you can make a lot more money by choosing to do the right things instead of choosing to do a lot of things. For example, he said, computer/software behemoth Apple doesn't rush to produce more products faster than CEO Steve Jobs can truly focus on.

More wisdom from Beck: When you take over a new company, the first day you should spend doing technical support or customer service so you can get a really good feel on customer feedback and customer complaints. Fire the customers who are the most work but the least profitable. Dream customers require the least attention but produce the most revenue. And with respect to the next five years, he said: billions of smartphones will be sold instead of hundreds of millions of mobile phones; social is not a platform but an idea of how to do things; and journalism will learn a different business model that is not based on advertising. (Let's hope so!)

One last thing, he said – don't get married or too attached to a company. Amen to that! 

No way we can have a blog about emerging media without including at least one posting focusing on this most interesting video about the impact and worldwide reach of social media. Professor Menck showed our Emerging Media class the first iteration of this video during a first class together. I then shared it with my New Media Writing class and can see doing so again in the future as part of an Associated Press Stylebook exercise :)

Anyway, here below is an excerpt from an article about the video by Ron Callari, a society and trends writer for InventorSpot.com: "Last year, Erik Qualman impressed us with his research and video titled, 'Social Media Revolution.' While some social media critics disputed some of the stats Qualman used to quantify his research, if even only 50 percent of the statistics listed in this year's follow-up video, 'Social Media Revolution 2 (Refresh)' weren't totally accurate, it's staggering the inroads social media has made in just one year. ... And if you want to use some of these stats in your own research and couldn't write them dow fast enough, here are 42 of the stats noted in the video:
   1. More than 50 percent of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
   2. 96 percent of them have joined a social network
   3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
   4. Social Media has overtaken porn as the No. 1 activity on the Web
   5. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
   6. Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…
   7. Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
   8. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
   9. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”
  10. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
  11. Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China
  12. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
  13. 80 percent of companies use social media for recruitment; 95 percent of these companies LinkedIn
  14. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
  15. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama. (Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.)
  16. 50 percent of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
  17. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
  18. Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets
  19. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
  20. The No. 2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
  21. While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
  22. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica … 78 percent of these articles are non-English
  23. There are over 200 million blogs
  24. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
  25. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
  26. 25 percent of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
  27. 34 percent of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
  28. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
  29. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
  30. 78 percent of consumers trust peer recommendations
  31. Only 14 percent trust advertisements
  32. Only 18 percent of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
  33. 90 percent of people that can TiVo ads do
  34. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
  35. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
  36. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
  37. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
  38. We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
  39. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.
  40. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
  41. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years
  42. Bonus: comScore indicates that Russia has the most engaged social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month. Vkontakte.ru is the No. 1 social network"

Like I said, very interesting.

So I had just left a faculty meeting and was heading to a barber shop when I read the e-mail. The subject line was simply "Update." The message a single line: "Story is now on the front of CNN.com." My family had gone global!

A little background. Nearly two weeks earlier, on October 20, Another e-mail had arrived: "CNN INTERVIEW REQUEST." That's a stop-what-you're-doing e-mail, right? Inside it said: "My name is Sarah Hoye and I am a reporter for CNN stationed in Philadelphia. ... I am following up on concerns over youth football as a result of the recent Rutgers University football player who is paralyzed after suffering a spinal cord injury while making a tackle. ... I am writing to see if any of you may have connections to high school football players in the Philly area; or parents of high school football players, who are willing to talk about the dangers of the sport, their fears or lack of fears. ... Thank you in advance and I look forward to hearing from you!"

Right away, I connected Sarah with my brother, Curtis, whose son, Calvin, is a varsity quarterback who the weekend before had just led his team to a sensational comeback against my high school alma mater. Last fall, Calvin suffered a concussion knocking him out of his team's state championship game. A couple days later, Sarah spent an afternoon with Calvin and teammates at the school and interviewed Curtis and his wife, Renarda, at their home.

So now, with no notice, it was live on CNN.com. I first viewed it using my CNN app for the iPhone, but couldn't listen to it because the barber shop chatter was too loud. Finding it online once back on campus was a challenge, because more than three hours had gone by since it went live. Finally found it on the U.S. page and there was my nephew's face, in the top left corner, right next to the face of the president of the United States! (A video of President Obama at a news conference during his trip to India anchored the webpage.)

After saving three screenshots for posterity, I then went about sharing this page with the world. Amazingly, more than two people had already recommended this for Facebook from the badge on the page. The page had about 72 comments from folks presumably from around the world. I shared the link via Facebook directly, as I have often shared webpages there. I then shared it on LinkedIn and Twitter, a much rarer thing as I typically focus on the former for connections and as online resume, and as far as the latter, I just haven't engaged there as much as I should.

Most revealing about the experience is that I never cared whether Sarah's piece actually appeared on CNN, the network, that is. Talk about emerging media. In the past, being on CNN meant being there at the exact time it came on or maybe missing it. Sure, you can TiVo it. But try taking TiVo with you or sharing it with everyone you know. It's so much easier to share a webpage link via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Or saving it to Delicious for easy access.

Like I always say, when you want your family to go global, keep it simple.

Learned in class today about social media strategy and why it's a new way of marketing. Introduced to Jason Kintzler, who describes himself on his blog, New Media Cowboy, as "a former anchorman turned PR guy" who is founder and CEO of PitchEngine, "a social PR platform that's putting an end to the 'word doc PR' era."

Love PitchEngine's website! Anyway, a key question posed in the discussion is how do you become an influencer, a trust agent? Seems the answer is being sure to listen to conversations, especially tapping into those online (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to find out what's being said about you or someone or something you care about.

Another key step is setting goals and benchmarks in developing a brand reputation, increasing its awareness and share of the voice (or SoV for short). We're told this will not only increase sales for a company or business venture, but also reduce the costs for research and development. Finding bloggers and online communities focused on the subject matter is crucial. Don't just lurk. Engage and facilitate the discussions. Create and deliver content for others to comment on and share with others. This is easier said then done, believe me, I know. I'm certainly nowhere near tweeting morning, noon and night. But it's cheaper to do it yourself then have to pay someone else to do so. Right?

Who knows, perhaps you can become one of those online influencers – say like David Pogue of the New York Times. His opinion with respect to technology and software is unbelievable because of his reach and credibility. We can only hope to someday have so much influence on matters we care about deeply. For now, let's just get into the conversation. It cannot hurt to not only listen, but speak up, too. Right?