The last couple of days have been absolutely insane, probably moreso for The Ashes than myself, after a small mixup on Twitter led to a degree of stardom for my girlfriend. It began as a bit of a misunderstanding and sort of blew up in a two day period. Allow me to summarize this story that has left me with my mouth agape and both of us in shock and giddiness.
As you may know from reading this blog I call my girlfriend Ashes or The Ashes. I started this at the beginning of our relationship nearly 4 years ago. She embraced this name and started using it as an online handle in various places, including her now defunct blog Just The Ashes. Most notably, however, she used it as her Twitter handle. Specifically she was TheAshes which meant that you could communicate with her by using @theashes. Any good member of the Commonwealth should now know why this could be an issue. Being Americans we of course were utterly clueless what she had done. So years passed on Twitter with her using that name until just last week.
This previous week was the first "test" of the 2010 Ashes cricket series, also known as The Ashes. Apparently this is a very, very big deal in England and Australia. These days Twitter has become very popular and rivals only Facebook in social media networking, and is more often used by professionals and celebrities. Livetweeting has also become a common part of any major event. Cricket fans would want to Tweet about this big event they love so much. Oh now this is where it gets very fun.
People started tweeting about the first test in Adelaide and while they should have been using #theashes to talk about the test many people used @theashes instead. On top of that there were plenty of folks thinking @theashes was the official account of The Ashes (cricket) this led to dozens to hundreds of people pestering my GF for the score. On top of that was Jonathon Agnew (famous?) incorrectly saying to tweet @theashes in order to talk about the game. And oh my god what a shitstorm started!
I don't even remember the alerts but I wouldn't because it wasn't my phone, but my GF was being woken up in the middle of the night to folks tweeting at her about The Ashes (cricket). She begged them to stop and eventually shouted at them "I am not a freaking cricket match!" which absolutely lit up Twitter users following The Ashes (cricket). People suddenly became very interested in The Ashes (person) and her ordeal in having to deal with hundreds of cricket fans. Within two hours of posting her quote from above she went absolutely viral, Australian and English fans eating the story up. Over night her followers jumped 3500, and over the next day she was up to 8600. At this point she's at 11000 and likely to go higher as the second test is about to start up.
When this first broke out she was getting mentions at over 100 every 20 minutes. Ashes, her aunt and I were sitting upstairs in the living room following this whole event in absolute hysterics. We couldn't believe how quickly her story was spreading over Twitter. Amazingly it started moving on from there thanks to word of mouth. She was a trending topic in Australia that night, both theashes and her quote. It didn't just stop at that as people started to contact her more and more. Offers for interviews with news stations, cricket shows and papers started pouring in! The first day after this all happened was so overwhelming we were mostly unable to do anything, but she kept tweeting and handled all this sudden attention like a pro. Her story started appearing all over the internet, from the NYT website to BBC to the India Times. It even featured in the news feed that comes with my browser.
She quickly embraced her new found fan and started playing along with the whole thing. She and I found a sudden and genuine interest in cricket. We both like learning and as complete neophytes at cricket we start at ground level. We have been studying our asses off trying to figure the game out. We had nothing to gauge this new info against and it was all so foreign! We'll have plenty of time to figure it out and a pretty damn good opportunity as we're actually getting flown out to The Ashes (cricket)! More on that in a bit.
So the second day she actually had some interviews scheduled. Channel Nine Australia sent a news crew out to our house! They set up a news studio in the living room and she did an interview for their Today Show. At the same time a local station from Boston showed up and did a story. She also managed a Skype interview with the BBC and a phone interview with CNN International. There were a few other radio shows that she did interviews for as well. It was all very, very overwhelming. Yet the people were drawn to her and her genuineness (duh, that's why I love her a-holes) and her good humor so she continues to be in the good graces of the fans following her story. She had more interviews the next day, with a camera crew from Springfield stopping by and a few more phone interviews. She has an interview scheduled with Jonathon Agnew (Aggers?) which is apparently a very big deal. As Americans we wouldn't know, but the Aussies and English seem to be going nuts over this and feel she is getting a huge opportunity.
It's all pretty amazing for one week, isn't it?
I've been staying in the background for most of this since it really isn't about me, but I've been helping her as much as I can. I'm trying to pick up cricket right alongside her. Plus when she flies over I get to go with her which is awesome. This is a once in a lifetime story and we are both just going along with it. She's so into this but realizes that it is a huge bit of fun with the opportunity to maybe do a bit of good too. She's really handling it like a champ and has got into the spirit of the whole thing. The Twitter users are mostly very nice and have really eaten up this story. We're both managing to get a lot of laughs.
Expect this story to take over my blog for a while as I keep updating what is happening and go into deeper details about other aspects. There is some stuff I can't talk about yet but let me just say the excitement is just starting for my Ashes, the viral cricket star.
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