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COSIDA CAPITAL ONE CONTINUING EDUCATION WEBINAR

August 27, 2019

Teachable Tuesdays Capital One Webinar

Do's and Don'ts for Social Media Today - From The Compliance Standpoint

THE MODERATOR: Good afternoon everybody, or good morning if you're on the west coast, and welcome to the second CoSIDA Capital One Continuing Educational Webinar of the Academic and Athletic Year. Today's topic is Do's and Don'ts for Social Media Today from the Compliance Standpoint.

I'm Mark Albanese, the director of sports communication at Pacific Lutheran University and today's moderator.

Before we begin, I would like to say a quick thank you to two of our corporate partners: Capital One and ASAP Sports. Capital One is the presenting sponsor of out continuing education and professional development series, while ASAP Sports provides the official full transcript of each monthly webinar.

As a reminder, the webinar and the ASAP Sports transcript will be posted later today in CoSIDA Connect, our memberships' online community. Please look for the links in the Connect Resource Library off the main page.

During this webinar today, you can ask your questions live to the presenters. Please use the chat box, which you will find to the right side of the portal. If you have questions for our presenters, we will have time at the end of the webinar to address them. Please send them to us now, and we will get to them later.

At this point we would like to introduce our panelists. Our first one is from the NCAA, Associate Director of Digital Communication and Social Strategy, Kayci Mikrut. Also from the NCAA we have the Assistant Director of Academic and Membership Affairs, Chris Johnson, and from Florida Southern College, the Director of Compliance and Academic Services, Hannah Delph. And today we will cover all three NCAA divisions in this topic, and we will start with turning it over to Kayci from the NCAA.

KAYCI MIKRUT: Hi, everyone, I'm Kayci Mikrut with the NCAA. I'm in my sixth year with the office. I graduated from Iowa State University in 2012, before joining the NCAA as a post-graduate intern in our public and media relations group. I left briefly after my internship and then came back here full-time in January of 2014. So I've been overseeing out general strategy since then. If you have any general questions about our NCAA model and what we're looking for in terms of content sharing, or how we look at social, I'm happy to answer those at the end.

CHRIS JOHNSON: My name is Chris Johnson. I'm the Assistant Director of Academic and Membership Affairs, specifically I look at recruiting. A lot of it comes around with social media and the ever-growing sphere of social media. I came to the national office in the beginning of 2019. I spent seven years on campus at the University of Oklahoma, and I'm a Winthrop University grad.

Without further ado, we're going to move right into our social media presentation. Before we start, I want to encourage all of the SIDs to talk with your compliance office about social media. A lot of cases with social media are very case-by-case specific and require specific analysis from your compliance office. I do ask that any questions you guys have are generic. I can't go into super deep details related to certain social media platforms. Again, it's a case-by-case analysis.

In general, though, good rule that we talk about in the national office is click it, don't type it. So we're going to move into talking about how to correspond and communicate with respect to student-athletes in the social media sphere.

The first part we talk about what you can and can't do with respect to student-athletes, and the big nexus related to that is if the prospective student-athlete has committed to the institution. Now, we talk about committed as signing a financial aid agreement, a housing deposit, a national letter of intent. We deem those as committed to the institution. There is a tie between the prospective student-athlete to the institution. It's important to note that verbal commits are not considered a commitment, via NCAA legislation, to the institution.

So after commitment, as you can see through this table, the rules allow a significant amount of communication and interaction with respect to student-athletes. Again, this is for committed student-athletes.

Prior to commitment, we are going to imply the click-it-don't-type-it approach. So anything that you can click, a like, a share, a friend request, typically is permissible. Anything in which you have to access the keyboard, and you start typing, whether that's a comment, a repost with a comment, is typically, most times, not permissible. When I was on campus we advised our Sports Information to utilize the click-it-don't-type-it approach as it relates to corresponding with prospective student-athletes on social media platforms.

So outside of the general comments with respect to student-athletes, there are a couple of other realms that we've seen institutions wanting to communicate via social media, specifically through teams of a prospect, noninstitutional athletic events with prospective student-athletes. This has come up quite recently in the National teams, with coaches participation, also recruiting and scouting services.

Generally speaking, a prospective student-athlete's team, coach or facility or noninstitutional athletic events, so these are your competitions, you can generally apply the same click-it-don't-type-it approach that we talked about with respect to a student-athlete. Specifically, friend, share, repost, like. Those are generally okay.

Now, moving over into the recruiting and scouting service, there is a pretty big restriction related to interactions with the recruiting or scouting services, and those typically are the ones that evaluate prospects based on their athletic ability. In general, no click, no type with relation to recruiting or scouting services.

It's important to note as an SID, I understand you guys receive a lot of posts and comments on your page, but if they do reference a recruiting or scouting service I would advise that you do not retweet, share, or post, even if you aren't sure. Err on the side of caution. We see a new recruiting and scouting service come up frequently. Today it's very difficult to discern between the two. I would advise that you talk with your compliance office, specifically, through those scenarios.

Again, PSA's team, so prospect's team, or an event in which a prospect is participating in, you can apply the click-it-don't-type-it approach. Now I'm going to hand it over to Hannah Delph for Division II information.

HANNAH DELPH: All right. Hello, I am Hannah Delph. I was swimmer at Florida State from 2010 to 2014 and loved following the rules so much that I found a career in compliance! So here I am to talk about Division II and our social media do's and don't. This is a great slide that the NCAA has provided. If you wouldn't mind, Mark, clicking to mine? Yes. So this is a document that NAAC put out a couple of years ago. I have the dates on here for DII. I know with athletic communications, you're visual people, which is great, so that's why I think this is a great document. I send this out to my athletic communications staff, most likely at the beginning of the year, when we have a new hire, and also right before NLI signing.

So the first part, again, thumb's up for what you can do, thumb's down for what you can't prior to commitment, and if you don't mind scrolling down, once that NLI is validated by the conference office, you have thumb's up across the board.

So typically what we do on our campus is I monitor, once NLIs are uploaded to our portal, making sure that they're validated by the conference office before I give our communications department the go-ahead to do any kind of social media publication for our sign knees.

I also let coaches know that they must wait until they receive my thumb's up. A lot of times our athletic communications department has graphics and things queued up, ready for our coaches to use, so I just ask that they wait until their NLI is validated or that I've confirmed that they have deposited at our institution.

Those are just in regards to signing. Before we go on, did you want me to stick with social media or any other best practices with signing, or did you want me to do anything else with social media, Mark?

THE MODERATOR: Yeah, I think mention the entire signing process. It could be beneficial to our DII membership.

HANNAH DELPH: Yeah. So typically I get the NLI requests early. Most of the time the coaches have already let athletic communications know what they've got signing. Sometimes they've already given them a list. Athletic communications may have something written up completely. So they just need to wait for my go ahead because they can't release the name or any kind of graphic, create original content. I let our staff know, coaches and athletic communications that they're more than welcome to retweet any commitments, they're able to retweet or repost or like anything that the student-athlete is putting out there, while they're signing, they just can't create any original content until I give them the go ahead.

Division II probably operates slower than DI. That's the biggest question I get is, I see on football signing day they're able to put something out immediately. Our conference office is comprised of three people so getting through those NLIs and validating them in a timely manner goes a little bit slower, so we can't get the content out as quickly as Division I, so I think that's the biggest misconception, is we will have coaches coming in saying, hey, can I post this? I saw that it's signed? Sometimes I miss a signature, sometimes I miss a date, and the correct date, time and signatures have to be on there for it to be valid; otherwise, if there is a post before the NLI is validated, we have a nice big red violation on our hands.

So we try to avoid that since it's something simple and it's keeping constant communication between myself, the coaches, our athletic communications department and the conference office.

That's all I have on the signing process.

THE MODERATOR: One question I have. You mentioned the university can't create original content about the student-athlete until they've signed. What if the coach or the department gave the student-athlete content to post themselves. Is that allowable or not?

HANNAH DELPH: We typically don't have that practice here. That's a great question. I know I sat in on some Division I rules that are a little bit different with, like, edits, so that might be something that Chris can touch on. I actually haven't had that come up, so, Chris, if you want to take that question, that might be best for you.

CHRIS JOHNSON: Can a coach create a graphic, provide it to the student-athlete and a student-athlete provides it to the prospect? Is that question?

THE MODERATOR: Yes, that's correct.

CHRIS JOHNSON: So in that case the coach is initiating the contact between the student-athlete and the prospect. In that case it would not be permissible because the idea behind the enrolled student-athlete communicating with a prospect is that the student-athlete is doing that on their own accord without the knowledge or initiation of the coach. Now the coach is creating the graphic, to give then to the student-athlete, to then give to the prospect, where did it originate from? It started with the coach giving it to the student-athlete. So that specific scenario we would actually say would not be permissible because it's initiated by the coach.

THE MODERATOR: Thanks for that clarification, and Chris can you talk about Division II and then maybe go in more in depth on Division III, which is totally different, not having NLIs.

CHRIS JOHNSON: That's a great question. We actually brought in Corey Berg, who is our Division III rep for recruiting. She is going to pop in and say some stuff.

COREY BERG: Hi, everyone! Last-minute addition panel today, so Chris didn't have to "wing" the Division III legislation. My name is Corey Berg. I'm Assistant Director of AMA for DIII. I've been at the national office for just under one year. I was a swimming student-athlete at the University of Virginia, graduated in 2006, then got into coaching for a long time at an Ivy League institution, and spent the last several years at a DIII campus before coming to Indy.

Happy to talk about Division III social media today. We've got a ton of questions since convention in January, because we did have a bit of a deregulation, which I think is a good thing, because it actually gets Division III more on par with where DI and DII are at, but we certainly have a couple of unique aspects to our legislation.

The first thing is that it really depends on the type of content that we're talking about. So if it's content created by a prospect or other users of the platform, so that could be anyone from the prospect's family to their club team, their high school team, their club coaches, high school coaches, Division III institutions, including institutional account, coach accounts, enrolled student-athlete accounts, when directed by the coaches are allowed to take actions of approval on content. So think, you're liking, you're retweeting, you're favoriting, all of that, so that's now permissible when it wasn't before.

But the content that you create, so your account, your coaches' accounts, your student-athlete accounts, when the coaches ask them to do so, that's governed by those two bylaws that are listed on the slide, 13.02.11 and 13.10.7, which is publicity. So Hannah talked a little bit about how DII's timeline is a little bit slower than DI; DIII's timeline is a little bit slower than that.

So we've got these three benchmarks that we consider in DIII. That first one is before the financial deposits to the institution and before May 1st of the prospect's senior year, so everything during that time has to be private, so everything during that time has to be private, and you're limited to those actions of approval, so you're liking, you're retweeting, you're favoriting.

After a recruit makes a deposit to the school, if it's still before May first of their senior year, everything stays private, you can only like, retweet, favorite, but you are allowed to announce their commitment to your institution.

So what that may look like can vary. It could be a press release on your website, you can include a picture, you can include general statistics about the student-athlete, but you can't publicly link them to the post. So whatever tweet you send out showing the story with their picture on it, it can't use their handle or otherwise publicly link them to that post.

The third benchmark, which is the one everyone waits for, is after financial deposit to the institution, and after May 1st of their senior year. At that time, total green light, like, favorite, tweet, retweet, tag, "at", other terms that I can't think of right now, but pretty much everything becomes permissible at that point. So we think it's pretty exciting because it's letting schools do a lot more than they were able to do previously.

We get a lot of questions about what's the chart? What are the yeses, what are the noes, so this gives you a good idea of what is permissible and what's still not permissible even with the deregulation that happened in convention in January.

So there are a heck of a lot more things in that "yes" column than there used to be, which is exciting, but there are still things in the "no" column and things that you will see that have to do with tagging, using the student-athlete's handle, having some sort of public communication or a group text or a group chat or a group snap, all that sort of thing.

Everything that is in that "no" column, once you do hit that final benchmark of a financial deposit and after May 1st of the prospect's senior year, all of that stuff moves over into the "yes" column because everything becomes permissible at that point. That's what I got from DIII.

THE MODERATOR: Corey, Kayci and Chris can you talk about the pitfalls that people do on social media, talk about DI, DII and then at DIII, because I'm sure they're different based on division.

CHRIS JOHNSON: I will speak to DI. Currently we're seeing a lot of involvement with recruiting and scouting services. I tried to harp on that a little bit in our presentation. As SIDs, institutional staff members, coaches, need to be aware of who is tagged in those posts when they retweet them. Specifically, there are a lot of recruiting and scouting services that are showing up, that an SID may not take a look at or even a coaching staff may not take a look at what profile they are retreating, and they accidentally retreat it, then they run into problems down the road.

The other portion that we're seeing is utilizing area codes to reference verbal commits from prospects. That's something that has come out recently over the last two years, and it's an interpretation that I would encourage all SIDs to talk with their compliance office about and really kind of develop where they are at as an institution related to specifics on that interpretation.

COREY BERG: So I think from a DIII perspective, we get a lot of questions surrounding how can currently enrolled student-athletes, how does this apply to them. We don't try to, nor are we in the business of regulating peer-to-peer communication. So if it's some sort of tweet, @Chris, did you see the game last night? Can't believe your team killed my team, something like that, that's fine. That's normal peer-to-peer back and forth, social media interaction, but if it's at the direction of the coaching staff and if the purpose of whatever message or tweet or post that it might be has to do with recruitment, then that's where we get into the nonpermissible space.

Then a little bit separate of social media and recruiting, DIII gets a lot of social media questions about out-of-season activities and how coaches and programs can interact with what student-athletes might post in the summertime, so, again, student-athletes are allowed to post if they run a 5K and get a best time in that race, but coaches or team accounts shouldn't be interacting with that sort of content because that would constitute them monitoring out-of-season activities which is not permissible. So not specifically recruiting related, but that's where we get a lot of questions in the social media space for 2003.

THE MODERATOR: We had a question come in from a DIII perspective. How do you deal with high school team accounts? Are you allowed to follow them, like their posts? And also, high school team coaches accounts, are you allowed to follow, like, retweet, et cetera?

COREY BERG: Again, it really boils down to who is creating the content. If that content is coming from the prospect themselves, or it's on a post to which they're publicly linked, so someone else links them, then you would be limited to those actions of approval, your likes, favorites, retweets.

We got a question, what if a student-athlete hasn't made a financial deposit to our institution but they come home, they loved their official visit, they say they want to come here, and they post a picture, "I love this school. I'm totally going to commit here." Our legislation would not preclude a coach or a team's account to liking that post. That's allowed.

But they wouldn't be able to retweet and then comment on that post, because that's still governed by the publicity legislation, so you would have to wait until that permissible benchmark of them having deposited to your institution before you can comment on that.

THE MODERATOR: Some coaches are club coaches at the same time, specifically in some sports like soccer and volleyball. Are they able to, from their club accounts, post things about those prospective student-athletes? How does that work when they're working for two different organizations at the same time?

COREY BERG: I'll touch on the DIII space and then turn the computer back around to Chris so he can speak to it. That would definitely be something that we would want to see submitted through the compliance officer, through RSRO.

If there is a specific post that could be attached to the case that would be awesome. DIII legislation does allow institutional coaches to be involved in any capacity with club teams, even if those club teams contain PSAs on them. However, there does need to be a mark of when you're acting as a college coach representing your institution and wearing your recruiting hat versus when you are acting in the capacity as that club coach. That would definitely be an example of a detailed, specific question but that's an overview of how we might tackle that.

CHRIS JOHNSON: DI is similar to that, if a coach is acting in a local sports club legislation, they would typically be allowed to post as a coach for a local sports club; however, this is one where I would encourage them to talk with your compliance office, again, specific rules for DI related to what coaches can and can't post, but in general, a coach acting in the capacity of a local sports club can generally tweet about, through the local sports club account, their activities with it.

The issue we see quite a bit is when a coach engages in recruiting conversation through their local sports club. They would need to have conversations with their compliance office about what is permissible and what's not.

THE MODERATOR: At this time I would like to remind everybody you can still submit questions to our panelists. At this time I would also like to ask the question of a lot of this focuses on coaches, so maybe everybody on the panel could give maybe some recommendations to SIDs of about how best to educate their coaches about -- obviously a lot of us know that we need to go to compliance to ask about these things, but some of our coaches don't. Maybe some best practices to educate coaches on what they need to do and what they need to know.

HANNAH DELPH: I don't mind starting off since I'm on a campus. With coaches, again, this is something where, whether they're doing a camp and they have a camp flyer, which obviously athletic communications is going to promote, or even with their schedules, I just make sure they're coming to me to make sure I can check all my compliance boxes.

I know on social media that you like to get the schedule out as quickly as you get them, but with a lot of our staff turnover this year and different people in different administrative roles, I wasn't -- I actually found out about our volleyball schedule via social media. I didn't see it before being able to do the declaration of playing season and making sure the dates were on time, so I think it's important also making sure if you get a schedule from a coach or a person from higher up in the administration just to double-check with compliance, especially if you're at a smaller school, because all the fall schedules I got after I saw them on social media.

So making sure that you just double-check. You might get a whole bunch of emails saying, yes, I got the schedule for 20 out of your 21 sports, but they you might get one saying no I didn't get the schedule, hold off on posting it on social media until I review. Likewise with camps and clinics, in promoting those with coaches, we have a standard practice here that before they give the flyer to athletic communications that it has to come to me to make sure it's following all of those applicable rules, and even our athletic communications department does a great job, when they do get a flyer or they see something posted on the website to promote a camp, they check with me to make sure I've been kept in the loop and I've seen it.

I think it's important that, yeah, as a one-person shop for compliance, I reach out and I talk to the coaches as much as I can. You as an SID, when something comes across your desk, it's not hard to just forward over to compliance, hey, just want to make sure you saw this before it goes live. That's just something I recommend as well.

COREY BERG: And Chris mentioned earlier -- what was the phrase that you guys had?

CHRIS JOHNSON: Click it, don't type it.

COREY BERG: We have been saying "tap, don't type" in DIII, shortening it down a little bit, so hammer that home with any of the coaches you may be working with. So a tap is a like, a favorite, a retweet, but any sort of typing would constitute them creating content, and that's not permissible unless you're meeting that timeline that all three divisions have, so I think that's kind of a simplistic way of looking at it.

I know in DIII we're trying to bust out some educational materials including a version of that chart that was on this slide, because we know that a lot of coaches, maybe they don't spend a heck of a lot of time in the office because they're out in the field, out recruiting so to have something that's mobile friendly that they can pull up and kind of think about that. Obviously SIDs would be able to use those as well. Tap, don't type.

CHRIS JOHNSON: Again, tap, don't type. I think we might try to steal that for DI. We did click it, don't type it. When I was on campus we would talk to our coaches, prospects, page, again, click, don't type, be cognizant of who else is tagged in that, again, recruiting or scouting service, I can't harp on this enough. Let your coaches know, hey, who is this person? Are they tagging or recruiting a recruiting or scouting service? Are they tagging ESPN, are they tagging a media entity? Their best friend? Know the person that's tagged in.

That was the biggest downfall we saw when I was on campus, is make sure you communicate that portion of it and generally speaking, click it, don't type it is a good thing to stick in the coach's mind that helps them understand a lot of the legislation.

COREY BERG: I think being aware also that social media is going to continue to change and update and evolve, so hopefully so will the legislation across all three divisions. So there might be bylaws that they get passed and don't get talked about again for 20 years, but social media in this space is not going to be one of those things, so just making sure that people know that there may be different rules today than there are in six months than there are in 18 months.

So just kind of being aware of that, too, can be really helpful.

CHRIS JOHNSON: I believe that's across all divisions, as well. Division I there are things that could potentially come down, and social media changes every day. There is a geo filter here and a geo filter there, and now what does this mean? Again, make sure you talk to your compliance office; they will be up to date with all the current legislation. Make sure you receive the adequate education from them.

THE MODERATOR: Awesome. At this time we would like to thank our panelists for coming on today. A very informative session. Again, we would like to send our support to our corporate partners: Capital One and ASAP Sports for their continued support of our professional development series. Reminder: You can find the on-demand webinar and ASAP Sports transcript on CoSIDA Connect, our membership portal, later this afternoon.

Thanks for joining us today and we look forward to you attending all of our future professional development webinars and content throughout the year. There is an NAIA webinar that starts on September 10th with a discussion on Stretchcast and other streaming platforms. We also have a September webinar scheduled on Thursday, September 19th on Young Women of Color. Please check CoSIDA.com and our social media channels for topics and updates. Thanks again for joining us.

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