Dallas Stars Twitter (@dallasstars and @thedallasstars)

What happened to the Dallas Stars Twitter? They removed me from their friend list, and changed everything!

If you’re asking yourself that question…it’s not what you think. Here’s what happened – it was all a mistake…

The Backstory…

Back in the Fall of 2007, @winkydo had an idea to start broadcasting the scores during the Dallas Stars NHL hockey games. So he went to register the account for @DallasStars and from then on, he and I (@neotsn) were all about posting updates, tying in news feeds. Our updates got pretty complicated using a 1400-character if-statement to parse a collection of inputs and derived values from a database of all the NHL players, their numbers and their teams. We’d watch every game, intently focused on a 52″ Plasma HD TV so that we could see which players scored, which assissted, and get all the stats up on the internet before the official NHL Game Stats page was updated – and often before the announcers could say.

Well, that lasted all the way until the end of 2008-09 Season.

We got a message from @cfaulk, asking who was behind the @DallasStars, but because we had hidden who was behind the account, and had a policy never to reply, opinionate, or follow people with that account, we did not respond. Unfortunately, the means that @cfaulk couldn’t find us to contact us.

Why does it matter that @cfaulk couldn’t find us? Because he’s the Sr. VP of Ticket Sales for the @DallasStars, Sr. Acct Executive for the Texas Rangers, and the Acct Executive for the Dallas Burn.

What happened…

Well, while the Dallas Stars organization was trying to get information from Twitter Co. about who was running the site, they created @TheDallasStars to start their feed. All they wanted to do was ask us to remove the word “Official” from our description since there was truely an Official feed out there.

…But they never got a response from the Twitter people.

Meanwhile, I saw the advertisement on Facebook for @TheDallasStars as the “Official” Twitter feed for the Dallas Stars, and made a comment advertising the one we set up. Then I went to look into the DallasStars.com website, and in their Fan Zone menu, and pulled up their Official Facebook Fanpage – it was the same one. So then I went back to figure out who it was that asked the @DallasStars who they were, and found it was @cfaulk and found him on LinkedIn, figured out who he was there, and asked him to confirm it. He responded asking who I was, and I gave him my contact info, explained how we were using the @DallasStars profile, but didn’t hear anything back

Then, today…

When @cfaulk and company logged into their Twitter account, they noticed that all-the-sudden, the account they registered (@TheDallasStars) was now simply @DallasStars. So I got an email from @cfaulk asking to talk to us. I went and looked at the @DallasStars page to find out it had been suspended as @DallasStars_I. So we were concerned too, because we had hoped we could transfer the fanbase to the NHL Organization by simply turning over the account credentials to the Dallas Stars Organization, as well as the infrastructure we had developed…and possibly work out some kind of contract-labor situation where we could keep maintaining it for them.

This evening there was a conference call placed between @winkydo, @cfaulk, @shickdog (Sr. Dir. of Communications) and myself (@neotsn). During our conversation, we discovered that @cfaulk & @shickdog thought we ditched the account; and @winkydo and I thought they had acquired the account. But apparently Twitter did it on their own accord, probably to reduce mitigation, and just hand over the account to the copyright holder.

We were all disappointed by this because we lost the fanbase we had gained over the 1.5 seasons of tweeting. However, that’s part of the fun – and we still have 2400 (of the 2538 followers) emails telling us who is following. So we can re-add everyone as time goes by, a couple each day so we don’t get banned for adding disproportionate amounts of followers.

Essentially all they wanted to get in touch with us for was to ask us to remove the “Official” verbiage from the description on our page. They were happy that we had such enthusiasm and wanted to remain in touch, since they were just getting started in all of this social networking, and we were able to acquire the fans without their media presence.

Here’s The Breakdown…

Now we have new accounts set up, and they all have purposes, and @winkydo and I are going to be working closely with @cfaulk & @shickdog to get all this up and running again. At least, that’s the hope I think everyone had when we ended the conference call.

Here’s the twitter accounts that came out of it, and what they are:

• @DallasStars – The Official Dallas Stars Twitter account (formerly @thedallasstars)
  • Follow this acct to get Official News from the Dallas Stars Organization
  • Updated and maintained by the Dallas Stars NHL Organization’s Communications Department
• @TheDallasStars – The Fan-version Dallas Stars Twitter account (formerly @dallasstars)
  • Follow this acct to get most of the Official News, the Popular Stars Blogs, and Live Scores
  • Yes, we did clear it with @cfaulk that it would be OK with them to re-register @thedallasstars since they had our original page.
  • Updated and maintained by @winkydo and @neotsn, with Live Scores and News feeds just like before. The same Dallas Stars feed/speed you loved for the past 2 seasons, but this time, you know who’s doing it.
• @DallasStarsLive – A new Fan-version of the Dallas Stars Twitter account
  • This is ONLY Live Scores updated during the games by @winkydo and @neotsn.

Please ReTweet this, and tell all your friends about this change – so everyone can hit the ground running next season!