UMBC Dir of Multimedia Communications Zach Seidel (@UMBCAthletics) was thrust into the spotlight Friday night during and after the team's historic win over Virginia in the NCAA Tournament. The night was filled with humorous takes from UMBC's official athletics Twitter account as the historic moment unfolded. Winning the game led to a spike in traffic to UMBC’s website, which crashed during the game. UMBC's Twitter account gained more than 100,000 followers, including 25,000 between 10:00-11:00pm ET on Friday. Seidel, who began at UMBC as an intern during his senior year in high school, has now been associated with it for a decade. The attention paid to his tweets during the win led to people telling him he needed to “put on a show” for the team’s second-round game against Kansas State Sunday night. His response? “People, shouldn’t you be watching the game for the game and not for the tweets?”
SOCIAL SNAPSHOT
Must-follows: I follow every baseball reporter; also ESPN people like Mina Kimes.
Favorite app: Twitter. It’s great, especially during sporting events.
Average time per day on social media: At my desk, I normally have Tweetdeck open for our accounts.
March Madness living up to its name:
If you had asked anybody about me or Sister Jean or the Butler Blue Bulldog, no one knows who we are, and now I’m getting stopped in the hotel lobby by random people. They’re like, “You’re that Twitter guy.” Students are asking for a shoutout on Twitter. I’m thinking I’ve never been this cool before.
How beating Virginia changed things:
My friends say how I tweet shows my personality. I have a close group of friends and am friendly with everyone. I like being behind the camera. This has been very odd to me, all this publicity. But there has been so much, I decided I would do the interviews for the school because I love it so much. It’s a little uncomfortable.
Staying on top of mentions, comments:
It’s not like I sit down and look on Twitter. If I’m by my laptop or phone, I’ll open it up for a second, but I don’t respond to everybody if I see something. I don’t try to force a response; there were a couple times where I thought about a response, but I deleted it. If I respond to something, I respond how I would if they said something to me face-to-face. The mentions are getting a little out of control, though.
Being part of a historic win:
People are telling me that. I didn’t shoot any threes; I can’t really shoot any threes. I’m more of a low-post player. It’s all the team. I was just there documenting it.
Lessons learned from the experience:
It’s amazing and people do care about personalities, not just people. People look for authenticity, not being fake. My tweets are just my personality, and people like my personality, normally. It goes to show you: be a little self-deprecating, don’t be afraid to clap back nicely and it will go a long way.
People wanting more of him:
That’s a bit weird. Someone tweeted at me that I am going to lose 30,000 followers. I was like, “So what?” He goes, “What are you going to tweet after this?” I was like, “Game releases, some of our other sports -- softball, baseball, lacrosse.”
