MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – For someone who grew up with Polaroids and Pong, social media content management systems are about as familiar as the backside of the moon.
 
But for digital media professionals such as West Virginia University's Grant Dovey, it's becoming their lifeline to the world we live in today.
 
WVU has joined the growing ranks of college football programs now managing their social media messaging instead of flying by the seat of their pants, thanks to cutting edge technologies such as INFLCR (Influencer).
 
The Mountaineers are the latest to subscribe to this innovative software service, which basically enables the digital media department to develop content for WVU student-athletes to send out to their social media followers.
 
According to Dovey, West Virginia's No. 1 proponent of INFLCR is coach Neal Brown, who used it extensively when he was at Troy.
 
"I didn't have to take this to coach Brown, coach Brown brought this to me," Dovey said.
 
The way INFLCR works is any Mountaineer football player with a mobile phone who downloads the INFLCR app will be able to share content Dovey and his digital media team send them, such as photos or videos from games or special events.
 
They can tag whoever is in the video or picture, and once they are tagged it will send them a notification on their phone. The student-athletes can either download the picture and share it themselves, or they can share it directly with their followers.
 
When they share content directly with their followers through INFLCR, Dovey and his digital media team will be able to track the engagement of each message and acquire valuable information that will help them tailor, fine-tune or improve their messaging.
 
"Obviously, our student-athletes are among our best spokespersons, and anything they put out gets a lot more engagement than some content put out from our official athletic accounts," Dovey explained.
 
Brown agrees.
 
"The brand of your program is essential because you are always presenting yourself as a program to your fanbase, to other shareholders, recruits, to recruits' parents," he said. "For us, our brand is we want to have fun, we want to be family-oriented, we want to be about winning.
 
"From an individual standpoint, I think it is critical to allow our players, within the team setting, to be individuals and really educate them on how to brand themselves," Brown added. "In this day and age, everybody's watching. And they are not only watching what you do today, whether you go on to a professional career in football or a professional career in engineering or medical or lawyer or education or whatever you are – the brand you are creating today is the brand that is eventually going to get them into those positions."
 
When Brown was at Troy, their usage of INFLCR was a real success story.
 
"Our football guys at Troy used the heck out of it," he said proudly.
 
In the past, when Dovey wanted to involve student-athletes in social media messaging, it usually required a text beforehand or tagging their Twitter handles and hoping they retweet it.
 
He did that occasionally with players such as linebacker David Long Jr. and the Stills brothers Darius and Dante - two of the most effective social media communicators on the football team, according to Dovey.
 
"They are very good on social media. Their engagement is impressive," he noted. "They're from West Virginia, and they really understand the fan base, and they are not even on the system yet."
 
Dovey said he will introduce the INFLCR app to the players and assistant coaches next week, and they will begin using it later this spring.
 
He envisions INFLCR being geared more toward Twitter and Instagram because those are the most popular forms of social media within the student-athletes' age group.
 
The rest of us using Facebook, we seem to be the ones most familiar with Polaroid and Pong.
 
Once INFLCR becomes operational for the football program later this spring, Dovey said it could eventually grow to include other WVU sports as well.