To put it bluntly, tennis player Tomas Berdych is considered to be an asshole. I personally like his style, but in the preppy and proper tennis community, he is well disliked.
Then he made a Twitter account. Everything changed.
A place where he could make fun of himself after a bad loss.
A place where he could show his personality outside of formal press conferences.
And guess what? He won the tennis world over.
Just four days after making a Twitter account (yes, four days), a posted article suggests: I’m not sure how we survived so long without Tomas Berdych on Twitter, but the world is a better place with the Birdman firing out tweets.
Since then, he has won many fans over by showing a side of his personality he could never show in his professional life.
This reminds me of Roberto Luongo’s “secret” Twitter account, Strombone1, an account that made him popular even when the consensus around him was not popular in Vancouver.
Twitter can be the perfect platform for an effective PR campaign. All an athlete has to do is be honest, funny, and show a side people didn’t know they had.