There was a cool article by Adam Ostrow in Mashable today about how NBA stars are using social media to establish their brands and get NBA All-Star votes. While Toronto Raptors power forward Chris Bosh has the gold standard in social media sites and exposure, Phoenix Suns PF Amare Stoudamire is giving him a run for his money.

So far, Stoudamire can’t hold a candle to the often hilarious and copious material Bosh has up on his site and on YouTube, AOL, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. He’s got tons of material on YouTube and his site is well updated.

Other athletes are also embracing social media. Washington Redskins tight end Chris Cooley has a very well-maintained Blogspot blog, although he recently got into a bit of trouble after accidentally putting a picture of his manhood on the site.

I would imagine teams and sponsors are a little bit nervous at the thought of their million dollar athletes having free reign over their exposure. There will undoubtedly be a few embarrassing tweets and Flickr images to emerge as athletes increase their social media exposure. But perhaps all press is good press, and more media exposure can’t be anything other than positive.

Recently, Minnesota Vikings tight end Visanthe Shiancoe was shown on Fox also showing his manhood (much the the embarrassment of Chris Cooley, I’d imagine), but the “exposure” has led to much increased interest in him, to the point where some people actually know how to pronounce his name.

Now, I didn’t mean for this article to become about pro athletes’ junk, but it goes to show you that sometimes, any kind of exposure can be a marketing positive.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 3:17 pmand is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.