Twitter is tough for control freaks. Sure, you get to send your own message and skip the middle men — usually the media — but once it’s out there, you have no say about who picks it up, how they re-frame it to share (if they share it at all) or what it gets lumped in with along the way. Sports leagues are near the top of the control freak pyramid and, for decades, the National Football League has led the pack. But the leagues also thrive on marketing, branding and publicity and today that means more than selling licenses to plop logos on everything. It means social media. That’s why last week we had a spate of stories about how the NFL is trying to control the way players, officials and fans use social media like Twitter — and why today I’m writing about the league’s new fan hub at NFL.com, where Twitter is just part of the aggregation.
— NFL.com/fans: We are embracing social media, says NFL.com GM Laura Goldberg, “and trying to get more and more aggressive with understanding there’s a huge conversation.” The new Fans hub being launched this week aggregates all things fan from across the site: discussions, live chats, Facebook, fan player ratings, highlights picked by fans, top-viewed NFL.com video, and more. Fans already have a voice on NFL.com, especially as a key component of its Game Center. When I checked in during a pre-season game Thursday night, more than 500 comments had piled up in the Rams-Chiefs thread alone. Scanning the top discussions list today, Thursday’s season-opening Tennesee Titans-Pittsburgh Steelers match already has nearly 2,800 comments.
At first, I expected www.nfl.com/fans/twitter to be a stream of twitters from fans. Actually, it’s everything but fans or players. It’s Twitter for fans — league, teams and media available as separate aggregated streams or as one river. “Most of these people are sort of ‘professional’ tweeters,” explains Goldberg. Translation, they are league, club or media folks who understand they have an audience and that some things won’t be accepted. Players will be added; the league is still trying to sort out which player accounts are legit. When that happens, Goldberg admits, “We’ll probably have to add some moderation.” Aggregating fan tweets, well, that may come down the road.
Goldberg says they’re looking at the various Open ID options — MySpace, Facebook, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) versus using only NFL.com’s own registration. It’s a tough choice. “One of the things we

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