Social media plays a very important role in how businesses reach out to new potential customer or current customers. In today's society social media allows business reach customers that they would never have been able to meet had their not been a social media outlet for them to connect through. For certain business such as sports franchises, Social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, linked In, and google+ allow these sports franchise's to advertise to potential customers at very low cost to the company, as well as, keep their current customers informed on the progress of their favorite team.
Lets take the NBA for example, where 28/30 teams have a team-page on Facebook and Twitter. These teams have realized that social media is a great platform to reach their customer and inform them on upcoming games, discounts, and activities.
However, while social media has become popular among many sports franchises, not just the NBA alone. Social media can be used to tarnish the name the name of the team. For instance, MLB has taken measures to ban all employees of major league teams from posting any pictures of their teams logo to their Facebook, Twitter, Myspace page.
"Major League Baseball has drawn the line by instituting a social media policy that, among other things, prohibits employees of all 30 major league clubs from using the name or logo of any MLB team on a personal social media site or from linking to an official MLB site from a personal social media site. So, in effect, an employee of a MLB team cannot have a link to his or her team’s website or use the team logo on his or her Facebook page or other social media site. Some would say that is cutting off the nose to spite the face."
Actions of this kind seem to defeat the purpose of social media, because the best way people learn about something is through word of mouth.
However, while it seems likes actions of this kind seem to be silencing the the expressions of thousands of employees. Major League Baseball is just doing what any business would do, which is to protect it's profits. Business don't want employees posting inappropriate things on to their social media pages. Actions of this sort have can have an adverse affect on each individual business.
Other sports teams have also instituted a ban on social media to the players of the sport. For instance, the NBA and NFL have instituted bans on the use of twitter and Facebook 45-60mins prior to the start of games.
Overall, the success of a business in today's society depends on how successful and how well companies use social media to their advantage. The benefits of social media are endless. Companies are able to network at a much more affordable cost than previously before. Instead of survey's done by market research companies, Facebook allows users to like any items that are a favorites to them. This type of information is invaluable and very important to the business model of business today
