One of the biggest headaches of a football agent is managing the clients reputation so the player’s head is always in the game on the pitch.
This goes triple for the manager who only wants the best for his player, team and club as a whole, but WAIT!!! What if you could delete, fix, remove & repair the ”negative stuff ”?
All too often we see ”off pitch” matters affecting the performance of a lot of athletes, thus having a knock on effect of imposing added pressure on them and leading to an average game performance, or in some cases a string of bad games , which can then put them on the fast track to the bench or even worse the transfer list. Managers must manage and mitigate liabilities and for some managers getting rid of a ”bad egg” might be the only remaining play if all else fails.
Not to mention that in cases where children are involved, being bullied or made fun of in school can be common place where their dad has seemingly fallen from grace.
The Source and The Sauce:
What tends to occur is that something ‘negative’ happens in the athletes private life which may be discovered or leaked to the press and thus broadcast to the world. Living your life in a fishbowl more often than not comes with the territory of stardom. The truth here is that ‘DRAMA’ sells and when you get DRAMA, CONTROVERSY and a CELEBRITY all in one for most media outlets this is the recipe for a golden headline especially in a culture that craves this sort of information.
One Side to Every ‘Drama Sweet’ Story
However, for various reasons it is usually a ‘one sided’ story that is run and in most cases more people will discover things online faster than they see it in the paper of course this is because online is cheaper, quicker and more convenient be it on the move via mobile phone or on an Ipad/ other tablet/laptop.
This scenario more often than not leads to a damaged reputation and even taunting/cyber bullying of the athlete in question. In a matter of seconds one tweet of one bad story can lead to a backlash of drastic proportions thus destroying a career and lifetime of credibility.
Rather than them being allowed to get on with their lives they have to relive the story for as long as it is kept alive or until hopefully something bigger and more ”Drama Sweet” comes along but in the meantime they are giving time off even though they would much rather take solace for 90mins of their week in the cheers of faithful fans and a ball at their feet , sadly the risk of their head not being in the game is sometimes to great.
The Solution:
Before we look at the solution lets look at some ”Prevention is Better” than cure tips involving Social Media and Real Life:
- Don’t Tweet while angry or in the heat of the moment and if you must, have a delay filter on your twitter before it goes out.
- Always think to yourself would I be happy with this tweet as a headline with my name.
- If you are caught in a compromising situation any evidence you can use to prove your innocence should be obtained immediately if possible.
- Don’t get into compromising situations.
- Distance yourself from any liabilities whenever you are in a public domain.
- Whenever a problem, embarrassing or stressful situation comes knocking sometimes all it takes is for you to step away from it. It’s smarter to step away from it and comeback with an experienced tactician than to tackle it head on keeping cool here is the key.
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Now the solution comes with online reputation management, an online reputation strategist can help put together a communication blueprint to remove the negative and replace it with positives or in some cases what really happened thus giving the same athlete the limelight to voice his side of the story.
With a reputation manager as an ally repairing credibility and defending against cyber bullies suddenly becomes an option but, this does NOT mean that an athlete should feel he now has immunity to do whatever he wants as there is a limit to which an ethical reputation manager will go.
The possibility of virtually instantaneous results to correct, contest and defend against false allegation accusations whistle blowers story sellers and the like to set the record straight has the positive effect of keeping the athletes head in the game knowing there is someone ”taking care of it” properly and of course it keeps the club owners, managers, friends, ”die hard” fans and most importantly their family and kids happy both at home and in school.
by Oyetola Oyewumi Ceo and owner of Chief Online Business Solutions Group (COBS Group)