Zach Seidel speaks to college marketers at a summit earlier this month in Chapel Hill, N.C.Trip Durham
Zach Seidel’s phone at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County won’t stop ringing from people who want to know his secret.
Earlier this month, Seidel spoke to a group of 70 collegiate marketers at a summit in Chapel Hill, N.C., about “finding your voice” on social media. The night before, he had been a featured speaker at Duke University, where he also spoke about the power of social media.
Seidel also spoke to a group at Long Beach State this summer, since he just happened to be on the West Coast on vacation and knew someone at the school. That doesn’t include countless other times when he connected via Skype or Facetime with other athletic departments to share what he learned on the delirious night of March 16 when UMBC shocked Virginia to become the first No. 16 seed to defeat a No. 1 seed in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
It was during the second half of the game that Seidel and his posts from the UMBC athletics’ Twitter handle became an entertaining sidebar to the Retrievers’ historic win. And through the evening, as Seidel posted one gloriously sassy tweet after another, he emerged as the best supporting actor in an Emmy Award-winning performance. Ever since, he’s been perceived as a social media expert in high demand.
“I’m not any smarter than I was five months ago,” said Seidel, 27, who still has the same job in communications at UMBC that he had on March 15.
It’s just that everyone who works in college communications knows who he is.
My boss wasn’t sure if he was going to let me go to the NCAA Tournament. We had a softball game that weekend and he needed me to cover it. But I said it’s been 10 years and a lot of losses since our last NCAA Tournament. I’m going.
We normally tweet from the game on our basketball team account, but knowing we were going to get a lot more attention, we figured why not tweet from our athletics account. That way we can use the opportunity to talk about our lacrosse program or whatever.
I don’t normally tweet our basketball games. It’s not my sport, so I don’t do it. My boss normally does it and he’s pretty old school. Like, “That’s a 3-pointer.” But we got to Charlotte and with everything going on, he asked me to do it.
His NCAA Tournament tweets last March went viral.
My boss is very trusting. He’s known me since I was 16. He’ll tell you that social is not his area and he trusts the staff to do it. He’s told me that whatever I want to do, he trusts that I won’t cross the line. He knew that I wouldn’t attack the other team or go after the fans or players.
I didn’t have a real strategy. The only thing I had planned to tweet about was a player who needed 15 points to set the single-season scoring record. I also had the responsibility to get our players to the postgame press conference, so I had to cut off social and I had 15 minutes to get the losing team to the interview room. The winning team goes first, and they have to be in there in five minutes. So, I’m thinking I’ve got 15 minutes.
Once the game is over, I’m typing, “What’s happening” and the guys run onto the court, and then it hits me: “We’ve got five minutes.”
We were just a few minutes into the game and Virginia led 5-2 when Seth Davis tweeted “Virginia. Sharpie.” I was legitimately angry. Give us a half, dude.
At halftime, it was 21-21. I looked at our post from halftime and it had been liked 2,003 times. Usually, it’s like four. That’s when I decided I’m going to change my style. We’re tied at the half, everybody is probably watching this game, let’s turn this into a promo for the school and let’s make it feel like we’re just watching the game from a bar.
The one everybody remembers is when I wrote “RESPECT. US.” That was the tweet that changed everything. It was kind of sassy, but we were up double digits and we just had this huge dunk. In my head, I’m thinking “Respect, what can I do with respect.” That was just the pure emotion of the moment. So it came out “RESPECT. US.” And somebody replied, “No.” OK. But that was me kind of testing the waters and people seemed to like it.
I always type out a tweet, and I think about it before I hit send. I’ll look at it for a good 30 seconds while I think about it from every angle. Like one time I had the word “insane” in a tweet and I just thought I should change it to “crazy.” I never hit send without thinking about it or asking someone else to read it.
The school has been all about it. They understand how effective it can be, so sometimes they’ll ask if athletics can retweet something. That night, we went from 5,400 followers to 100,000, and it’s settled at around 90,000.
I talk to other schools a lot about how you find a consistent voice because so many people control your accounts. Every school is different. What East Carolina wants is going to be different than what Duke wants. The people won’t have the same voice, so you have to find a theme. At UMBC, our theme is that we’re approachable, we’re laid back, we like to have fun. At a bigger school, you might have 20-some people who have access to an account. So, you need a theme that sort of guides you.
