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 spirit 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.
A young NBA fan parlayed his Twitter savvy into free tickets, then a fulltime job with his favorite team.