Twittering Aquilani

Early yesterday afternoon, amongst the trending topics on Twitter it appeared as though Alberto Aquilani of Serie A's FC Roma had actually already signed for a new club, the Premier League's Liverpool FC. A check on the major news sites (newspapers, television, specialist internet sites and new agencies) around this time failed to provide any evidence that Aquilani had switched clubs (although stories had been circulating for weeks that he would move to Liverpool from Roma once Xavi Alonso moved on to Real Madrid). This blog has already addressed issues pertaining to the wisdom of crowds, the role that social media play in predicting the future, and the use of Twitter in sport. Yesterday afternoon, all of these elements appear to have come together which poses some interesting questions: is Twitter one of the most powerful predictive tools currently available to members of the general public? If so, how should managers and decision-makers in and around sport be using it? Do sport organisations solely see Twitter as a marketing tool when in fact it is something much more powerful - a mechanism for generating an array of possible scenarios and outcomes to the challenges they face? Or is that Twitter is simply the fast medium for gathering and disseminating news? Had Aquilani indeed already signed when the Twitter stories started filtering through - hence Twitter isn't in this case predictive at all, it was just fast? Yet if Twitter really is so fast and effectively bypasses traditional outlets for news stories, then how should sport newspapers, television programmes and other content providers respond to the challenges it is now starting to set them?