John Calipari is the Head Basketball Coach at Kentucky. He is currently preparing his No. 1 seed Wildcats (34-2) to play No. 12 seed Cornell (29-4) this Thursday in the Sweet Sixteen of the N.C.A.A Men’s Championship Tournament. He is also probably telling you what is happening in his practice via Twitter and Facebook. Okay – so maybe not what is happening in practice at this present point, but Coach Calipari is an avid user of social networking sites. Calipari has 1,113,746 followers on Twitter, 138,747 fans on Facebook, and his Coach Cal application for the iPhone and iPod touch sold more than 6,000 applications in its first month, making it the top paid sports application on iTunes less than a week after its debut last month, the author (Thayer Evans) explains. Coach Calipari says social networking keeps him in touch with Kentucky’s fans (and anyone else who is interested). His web site, CoachCal.com, which went up in July, receives more than 100,000 page views each week. People have visited it from more than 100 countries, even Kyrgyztan, which borders China. Some of the money made from the Coach Cal application and his Web site go to the nonprofit Calipari Family Foundation for Children. His technological platforms have also been instrumental in his other philanthropic ventures like the “Hoops for Haiti” telethon in January, which raised $1.3 million.
The results of Calipari’s efforts to raise money through technology have been a step in revamping his often-controversial image of a coach who took Memphis and Massachusetts to the Final Four, but both programs were ordered to give up their victories in those seasons because of N.C.A.A. violations. “He’s using it (social networking, web site, and application) for good, not evil,” said Dave Scott, who helped co-write a book with Calipari and dealing with his website and social networking accounts. During the season, Scott often spends 18 hours a day on Calipari’s Web site and overseeing his Facebook page. He also assists with Calipari’s Twitter feed, but Calipari himself makes a majority of tweets. Calipari is a good example of being a news assembler. He transfers promoted occurrences through publication (Twitter, Facebook, CoachCal.com, etc.). For example, when he posted in past weeks, how to buy tickets to the East Region, raved about eating barbecue shrimp, escargot and an “unreal split pea and shrimp soup” in New Orleans, and asked his followers to send text messages to vote for point guard John Wall as Naismith Player of the Year. These are all examples of promoting occurrences through publication that lets Kentucky fans (and whoever else is following him), what is occurring in his life at the most current or recent moment through social networking.
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