These things have become such an accepted part of
day-to-day life that they're now routinely mentioned on wrestling shows. WWE is
actually one of the chief investors in the Tout experiment. The poor judgment
of that is a topic that will have to be discussed another time.
It's all pretty bizarre when you stop and think about it.
Social networking, by its very nature, is not something that can exist
peacefully alongside wrestling. At least not on the surface of it. It seems
designed to expose secrets and inner feelings, things that the wrestling
business has always needed to suppress in order to exist. Social networking
defies kayfabe, the thing which wrestling at its heart still holds holy.
Don't fool yourselves into thinking that kayfabe no
longer exists. It's changed in nature over the years but it's still around. WWE
has been acknowledging its predetermined nature for around two decades. Over
time most other companies have followed their lead. It's been an open secret
that wrestling wasn't an actual contest for far longer. Kayfabe used to mean propagating
the lie that everything that happens inside the ring is real. Nowadays it's
more accurate to say that it exists to mask exactly how wrestlers do what they
do without injury, and to keep future storylines under wraps.
Twenty years ago the social networking craze (fad, call
it what you will) would have been disastrous for wrestling. It would have been
too much too soon. As it is it came along at more or less the right time for
wrestling. It's taken a while for those in the business to learn how to use it,
and nobody has mastered using it to its fullest effect yet, but they're not far
off.
At its most basic level the social networking medium is a
great tool for wrestlers to interact with their fans. That's good news for all
companies but it’s particularly handy for those that target younger markets,
like WWE. For an eight year old who's massively into John Cena I can imagine
there are few bigger thrills than the prospect of interacting with 'The Leader
of the CeNation'. Twitter is ideal for WWE PR, fans, and wrestlers like Cena.
Of course Twitter also presents wrestlers with the
ability to embarrass themselves, their peers and their companies. You don't
need to go far to find examples of tweets that do wrestlers and their employers
more harm than good. Ryback immediately leaps to mind there. He's tweeted some dodgy
stuff in the past. When feuding with Cena earlier this year he mentioned Cena's
ex-wife before deleting every tweet he'd ever made. A few months later he
venomously lashed out at fans before pulling the full deletion trick again.
Lock up your wives
The important thing for the promotions themselves is
making use of the medium for storyline purposes and doing so in moderation. A
standard wrestling feud cannot really benefit much from Twitter. It will
generally be two guys exchanging victories on TV and perhaps a pay-per-view
with only the desire to win keeping them locked in battle. Wrestlers in such
feuds can take shots at each other but ultimately they won't be able to add
much to the rivalry because there won't be much to build on.
More advanced storylines can benefit greatly from
embellishment using social media. The second Summer of Punk in 2011 was an
early example of WWE experimenting in the field. A more recent example, and probably
a more successful one as far as social media is concerned, has been the
management versus Daniel Bryan story. It’s not featured social media in an
overt manner, but it has seen a successful blurring of the lines between
on-screen plot and reality. Or at least what wrestling fans perceive reality to
be.
There’s tremendous potential for wrestling companies,
particularly WWE with its immense resources. Once they’ve mastered how to
integrate these opportunities with their TV product fully, and I don’t think
they’re too far away from that, I think the nature of wrestling, its
storylines, performers, and how we as fans interact with it all, will make a
huge leap forward. Twitter scrolls at the bottom of screens are just the start.
