On Friday, Mashable brought you the story of two NBA fans
who took it upon themselves to help out their favorite team on Twitter,
only to receive a legally threatening email. By the end of the day,
though, the fans had traded in the Twitter accounts they created for box
seats to the Philadelphia 76ers’ home opener and season tickets.
On Monday, the story took another turn and one of the fans, Jerry
Rizzo, was rewarded for his entrepreneurial sprit with a full-time
social media position with the team — “about as close as it gets” to the
perfect job, he said.
The 76ers launched a fan voting contest last week
to choose a new team mascot between three finalists. But the team
failed to get the nominees on social media, so the 23-year-old Rizzo and
his friend Hunter Coleman, a 22-year-old teacher, registered Twitter
accounts for two of the finalists, @PhilEMoose and @BFranklinDogg.
They began tweeting from the accounts trying to help promote the contest and drive fan engagement. On Friday, however, they received an official email
praising their loyalty to the team but requesting that they hand over
the accounts, “pleasantly without the use of lawyers or anything like
that.”
Hours later, Rizzo — a communications graduate and self-described
“social media sponge” who was at the time interning with a media group —
called the organization to see what they wanted to do with the account.
The team eventually offered them “a fair deal” — the box seats and
tickets for potentially doing more work with the team — and Rizzo and
his partner gave up the accounts.
Then on Saturday, 76ers CEO Adam Aron
left Rizzo a voicemail asking Rizzo to call him back. Rizzo did, and
Aron quizzed him about his interests and experiences, adding that he had
been impressed by Rizzo’s online portfolio and work. On Monday, Rizzo
went to team headquarters for a series of in-person interviews before
sitting down with Aron again.
“He said, ‘We’d like to offer you a position with the team,” Rizzo
recalled on Monday evening of accepting a social media coordinating
position. “And I said, ‘Yeah.’ I mean, it would be kind of like a dream
job for me.”
But, according to Beverly Macy, a Huffington Post contributor and author of the book The Power of Real-time Social Media Marketing, Rizzo’s story isn’t just a quirky tale — it’s also hard evidence of a larger shift in the communications industry.
“It just shows that people now have the ability to showcase who they
are for good and bad, and that all of that is findable,” Macy told Mashable.
“It says it’s about personal initiative and that if you have a love or
an affinity for something just go do it, because you don’t know what
might happen.”
Aron, who has said that enhancing 76ers’ social media presence was a priority since he took over as CEO in October, told Mashable
that hiring Rizzo was his idea. Previously, more senior employees had
been handling the team’s accounts in their spare time, but with no one
fully dedicated to the task.
For his part, Rizzo said that setting up the mascot Twitter accounts brought about unintended, if appreciated, consequences.
“I knew when I was doing the accounts that I was handling them in a
professional way, but it wasn’t for the purpose of getting a job or
tickets or anything like that,” he said. “So I’m definitely surprised
and super thankful that Adam Aron recognized my passion for social media
and took the time to look at my portfolio and get to know me.”
Aron said that other job seekers would be well-served to learn from Rizzo’s online initiative.
“Jerry impressed us not just with his clever Twitter campaign, but he
had also created a website that was just loaded with content that
demonstrated his creativity and drive and that he is a good writer and
knowledgeable about social media,” Aron said. “He did online what people
have done in job-searching efforts for decades — put his best foot
forward and demonstrated what he can bring to an employer.”
“Welcome to the brave new world,” Aron added.
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