Darren Rovell

@darrenrovell · Sports Business Reporter, ESPN

@andrewett What I'm not worried about: Twitter is still the social media of choice for sports fans. What I am worried about: There's a better way to monetize than what they're doing now.

Jacob Sudek

@jacobsudek

@darrenrovell Hey Darryl, long time follower! How can Twitter do a better job of monetizing without jeopardizing the product?

2 share tweet・a year ago

Dean Curtis

@deanpcurtis

Should the NCAA allow athletes to have direct sponsorship deals (with regulation and oversight of course)? Any downside?

4 share tweet・a year ago

@darrenrovell · Sports Business Reporter, ESPN

@deanpcurtis I've voiced my opinion on every college football and basketball player getting paid. I'm not for it. I am for any player to be able to market themselves and make what they can and I'm also for players getting a cut of their jersey sales. Put the name on the back, it's what fans want. The issue with this of course is how to keep this above board -- will a booster guarantee a kid he will buy 15,000 jerseys if he comes to a school. The simple answer here is that recruiting disadvantages and advantages already occur and so it's not like it's a pure game right now anyway. What I think kids will find is they aren't worth as much as they think they are worth. The top guys will be able to clear $100K a year, but that's 20 guys TOTAL a year in both sports combined.

Zach

@zjl00 · Student

How does it work with athletes and Twitter? Do some athletes write all their own tweets, or do most have a pr firm write them?

2 share tweet・a year ago

@darrenrovell · Sports Business Reporter, ESPN

@zjl00 having a PR firm or someone else write your tweets doesn't really work in my opinion. Either engage yourself or don't participate.

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Andrew Ettinger

@andrewett · Product Marketing, Twitter (ex-PH)

Who do you think has been more valuable to Under Armour - Steph Curry or Jordan Spieth? Which metrics do you use to determine that?

@darrenrovell · Sports Business Reporter, ESPN

@andrewett Andrew. Thanks for getting me on board here. In regards to Under Armour and their gains with guys like Steph Curry and Jordan Spieth...

@darrenrovell · Sports Business Reporter, ESPN

@andrewett I think the big $ behind their big bets which have been amazing hasn't really paid off yet. There's a lot of unsophisticated investment in the market that is driven to UA because of these guys, but it's not dollar for dollar yet. UA isn't even committed to a Spieth signature line which I'm shocked about. But they've been making some nice money on UA golf polos which you can attribute to Spieth.

2 share tweet・a year ago

Lisa Zimmer

@zimmerino · Beer Culture Manager, MillerCoors

Does your interest in beer and the beer industry stem from the sponsorship relationships to sports or would you still be following along if you were an accountant?

@darrenrovell · Sports Business Reporter, ESPN

@zimmerino Lisa, love beer. Love drinking it. There are some good journalists that cover the space, but not enough and as someone who loves business journalism, I love following the business stories behind sports, beer and food -- which I think you'd agree are kind of connected. It's been amazing following the alcoholic soda craze of recent (Not Your Fathers and Coney Island Root Beer to now Henry's Hard Soda). The growth of the Shandy has also been interesting to watch as MillerCoors has pushed Leinenkugel's to become a national brand in recent years.

6 share tweet・a year ago

Einar Angeltveit

@eangeltveit · Football business and finance student

Hi Darren. Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. What advice would you give to young proffesionals wanting to break into the sports industry?

@darrenrovell · Sports Business Reporter, ESPN

@eangeltveit always love answering this question. How do you get into the business of sports and make enough money to make it a career? Be so passionate about your mission and about your dream that you don't sleep until you figure out how you are going to be different -- how you are going to provided added value to a team, agency, etc. Given the number of people who want to work in sports half the battle is jamming your foot in the door. Never forget that. Getting that foot in the door is just as important as having the goods to show when you get in.

@darrenrovell · Sports Business Reporter, ESPN

@eangeltveit And when you get your first job in sports, don't relax. Don't sleep. Act like someone is going to steal your job every day. Stay hungry and focused.

Einar Angeltveit

@eangeltveit · Football business and finance student

@darrenrovell Thank you very much!

Theoharis Dimarhos

@theo_dimarhos · Marketing+Biz Dev at AngelouEconomics

Hi Darren! What do you think is the best way to contact a player (team, agent, agency) and how do you pitch them for a collaboration? What athletes are usually more open to that?

@darrenrovell · Sports Business Reporter, ESPN

@theo_dimarhos agents want you to obviously go through them. But it depends on what you're asking for. I've found it has a lot to do with how much trust an athlete has in his or her management. If it's not much, the word will get out that they want to do it themselves.

Sebastian Fung

@sebfung · User Acquisition

Do you think the NBA will eventually embrace tools like the Whoop for more analytics? http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/i...

@darrenrovell · Sports Business Reporter, ESPN

@sebfung I think analytics in sports used by teams internally and the exporting of data and putting what athletes are doing on screen has a very big future. The big data question however is what data is good data? There's a lot of investment in data today and I'm not so sure it's all good. Under Armour made a big bet on big data -- if it's not as relevant as they are calculating, they're in trouble. So like anything I don't think it's smart to just put data into one big bucket and be positive or negative about it.

Harry Stebbings

@harrystebbings · Podcast Host @ The Twenty Minute VC

What medium do you find is the best for sharing your content? What has the biggest conversion rate? Love to hear your thoughts!

upvote share tweet・a year ago

@darrenrovell · Sports Business Reporter, ESPN

@harrystebbings Twitter is definitely the king of something going viral. It's not just me with my number of followers -- even someone with 20 followers if they say something amazing, they can be noticed. Doesn't happen that way with Facebook or Instagram. I spend the most time on Twitter because I think it's worth spending the most time on. I monitor my analytics constantly to develop a best practices of sorts -- including what to tweet, how to tweet it and what time to tweet it.