COURTSIDE TWEETS
When the 2020 NBA season was restarting in Orlando, the league approached Twitter about a potential collaboration. Since fans wouldn’t be able to attend games in the bubble, the idea was to put their Tweets there instead on opening night. I was responsible for sourcing and vetting all the fan Tweets, getting permission from the users, writing all the copy, and publishing replies to the fans and outbound Tweets from @TwitterSports.
Because of the pandemic and the logistics in the bubble, we initially thought we’d only get images of the Tweets next to the court. Players might be in the photos but there was no guarantee. But the NBA photographer overdelivered for us and we ended up with videos and images of the fan Tweets, some that even featured the player the Tweet was about. In true Twitter fashion, we adjusted on the fly without anyone noticing but still highlighted the Tweets, just in a different way than we had planned.
We featured a Tweet from Northwestern basketball player, Charlie Hall, whose mom is Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
Before we launched Courtside Tweets, @TwitterSports did a countdown to the opening night in the bubble. Every day I flipped the profile to celebrate each team’s vibrant Twitter community.
Me after I wrote all that copy and sent all those replies and hit all those outbounds and flipped the @TwitterSports profile every day for 3 weeks.