Not an intern: How the young Warriors social media team manages one of the most powerful brands in sports

OAKLAND, CA - SEPTEMBER 26:  Stephen Curry #30 of the Golden State Warriors poses for the Warriors' social media team during the Golden State Warriors Media Day at the Warriors Practice Facility on September 26, 2016 in Oakland, California.  (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)
By Shayna Rubin
Nov 6, 2018

Brian Witt will never forget the feeling he had that June 19, 2016 night.

A historically excellent Warriors team heading for the Oracle Arena exits after Game 7 — LeBron James crumpled to the center of the hardwood crying in jubilation — blurred in the background while Witt’s eyes fixated on two Cavaliers fans, a father and son, celebrating just in front of him on press row. The disappointment, the controversy surrounding the entire series that trailed this new kind of devastation, was difficult to ignore.

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“It was complete bullshit,” Witt said in a recent phone interview. “But I am a little biased.”

With all his might, his preference for the Warriors — a fandom cultivated since childhood — had to be pushed to the side. Witt, then the Warriors’ digital content producer, had to pull up his blinders and write an objective account of what he’d just seen. It was the most difficult recap he’d ever written for Warriors.com.

“You try not to take it personally,” he said. “I’m not making the shots, but all the work the employees do, you’re putting in the hands of the players. What you do on a daily basis is dependent on what happens the court.

“Employees have to deal with 3-1 jokes, too.”

Years before covering the Warriors’ lowest point, Witt created something that marked the team’s semi-official ascent into stardom: The Splash Brothers hashtag, born out of a solo brainstorm as he tweeted about a random December 2012 game against the Charlotte Bobcats in a process he detailed for The Athletic.

“I think they’ll be known as the Splash Brothers forever,” Witt said. “Before it caught on, I thought maybe in 20 years they’ll do a ’30 for 30′ about this upstart Warriors team that had a nice playoff run for a bit, with a great backcourt known as the Splash Brothers, and I’d have a quick interview saying how I came up with the name and that’s it. It’s obviously become much more than that.”

And, in retrospect, the Splash Brothers origin story is worth a double take not only because of its international appeal but its symbolic ties to social media’s swelling, often taken-for-granted influence on sports. And, given the nature of the beast, that social media’s influence is wielded by a bunch of recent college graduates trusted to take the job on due to youthful familiarity.

The millennial generation grew up with social media. In theory, they’re the experts.

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Witt was 23 and tweeting for @Warriors from his couch at home when he came up with the nickname that taglines one of the most influential teams and backcourt duos in the history of professional sports.

If you happen to catch some footage of the Warriors warming up pregame and glance over at the sideline, perhaps your eye and ire would catch the few 20-somethings with their heads hunkered over, thumbs tapping away furiously on their phone (sometimes, they’re Paul Pierce-ing it).

That visual is striking because it reminds us of ourselves at our most distracted — when not at our most productive or social, we’re sucked into the virtual “time wasters” that exist within tiny screens on our phones.

But those typing away on the sidelines at Oracle Arena (or on the couch by the TV) are anything but distracted. At their fingertips is one of the most powerful brands in the media landscape and an ever-growing audience of millions of followers and likes.

No matter how casual the platform may feel in daily life, the people typing away want you to remember something: This is no minor job, there’s a lot at stake and they are not interns.


Witt never really enjoyed the times he had to produce social content for the Warriors.

“Because if you come up with a great tweet, no one comes and pats you on the back and says ‘good tweet,’” he said. “But if you do something wrong you’re gonna hear about it. For me that wasn’t really worth it.”

After the Splash Brothers took off, he transitioned more to writing recaps for the website and the Warriors expanded their social/digital team to nine employees with more defined roles in social and digital content.

The Warriors social voice is synonymous with Julie Phayer, who left the Warriors before the 2018 season for a position doing social media for The Ringer.

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“After (nearly) six years with the Warriors, it was time to start a new chapter,” Phayer said in a Twitter direct message. “I was presented with an amazing opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.”

But with Phayer — and behind every seemingly-fleeting social post — was an entire team of digital employees. Most NBA teams average about four digital/social producers. The Warriors’ team of nine will grow to 12 this year. It takes weeks of preparation and work to produce those auto-play videos you watch while perusing your phone in boredom during your cramped BART commute.

Michelle Poole and Katie Cracchiolo are two of the social media producers (officially called digital assistant and digital product manager) you might see taking Boomerangs during warmups and lurking in the tunnel for prime positioning to capture Curry’s famous long-range pregame 3.

On 2018’s opening night against the Thunder, Poole, Cracchiolo and their manager, Andy Fahey, were communicating throughout the night about which one of them would capture specific moments for their social channels. After posting warmups to Instagram story (Snapchat, they note, is fading in user activity and, therefore, as a social media priority for the brand), Poole got the Curry tunnel shot assignment.

And though it’s become a beacon of any typical Warriors or Curry fan’s game consumption, it’s only just a sliver of what’s on the social team’s docket.

The work day on opening night, like every other home game day, begins at around 9:30 a.m. at the Warriors’ Oakland office and ends at 11:30 p.m. in Oracle as the postgame dust settles. NBA social teams, like the Warriors’ group, go on most (not all) roadtrips with the team, and travel on the chartered flight, too. If they don’t travel, at least one of them is tied to the couch (as Witt was) posting like they would any other game: up to two minutes of highlights (as regulated by the NBA) on their channels, GIF hunting and stat-graphic composing.

But however simple and fun it sounds to post viral Curry half-court shots and Klay Thompson record-breaking highlight compilations for a living, the job is not so glamorous.

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Work days during the regular season can last up to 16 hours, but are there any off days? Offseason?

“The joke around the office is, ‘what offseason?’” said Cracchiolo, who was sitting at a makeshift desk in the media workroom at halftime on opening night. “If we play until June, we have the Finals, then the draft, then free agency, then the schedule release. It’s slower, but we are at work planning what we’re going to do during the season before it happens. Basketball is always in the news cycle.”

And these days, social platforms act as official news breakers. An official record.

“It’s a 24-hour thing,” Witt said. “You are essentially on the job around the clock. Even when you’re sleeping, something can happen. It’s that sort of inability to get away from things mentally that I think is an underappreciated, an overlooked downside of a career like that. Especially when you’re doing it for a team like the Warriors that’s in the news all the time.”

Take Kevin Durant and his famous “My Next Chapter” Players’ Tribune article from July 4, 2016, announcing that he would be signing with the Warriors. Witt was in Wine Country, trying to escape for a bit (what offseason?), when the news got to him via a coworker’s text at 8 a.m.

“It was Fourth of July, we had been drinking, it was the best reason to ever have to get up super early after drinking,” Witt said.

Not many had realized that early on the West Coast, but he noticed once he opened Twitter.

The NBA forces a strict moratorium period where teams (and employees of the team) have to pretend the news never landed.

The Warriors digital team had to sit on their hands — posting a boilerplate Happy Fourth of July graphic — and move on. But the wheels were spinning. An “off day” turned to news day. The team went back into communication mode.

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“There was a lot to consider,” Witt said. “The historical magnitude, the effects it would have on the roster, the timing of it — before putting finger to keyboard.”

And if the Warriors don’t post a confirmation, did it all really happen?

The spotlight shining on the Warriors’ brand, at that very moment, went full brightness. But the light was already intensifying. To get a full grasp of just how powerful the Warriors social media brand has grown to be, take a look at the numbers within this decade.

According to Statista, in 2017, the top-three leading brands (measured by user engagement) on social media were National Geographic, Bleacher Report and the NBA. That year NBA was the most engaged with brand when it came to social media video. As of January 2018, per Statista, the NBA was the fourth-most popular video creator on Instagram behind 9gag, Worldstar and Hoodclips.

The NBA’s popularity on social platforms are, in part, due to commissioner Adam Silver’s lax attitude about teams and third-parties repurposing NBA-owned highlights. And that leniency has turned into increased exposure and it has all helped teams like the Warriors thrive on social media.

The Warriors are the second-most followed NBA team on Twitter behind the Los Angeles Lakers. But the Warriors’ follower count jumped exponentially in correlation with their recent success — from 110,000 in September 2012 to 5.92 million followers by November 2018. In that same timespan on Facebook, the Warriors jumped from 360,000 to 11.09 million likes. And they have 9.8 million followers on Instagram.

“We kind of started hitting our stride at the right time,” Witt said. “We became one of the most popular teams in the world when people were still sort of deciding their loyalties not just to sports teams, but to different apps and platforms.”

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Oh, and speaking of the world. The Warriors launched their Weibo account in 2013, which, from what I can gather through Google translate, has just over 5 million followers. The move made them the first NBA team to expand their social reach in China and the team hired Sissi Feng to run their Chinese social media brand.

The social team saw those numbers come to life, in person, on the team’s 2017 China trip. The staffers waded through all the fans that waited 24/7 outside the team hotel to catch a glimpse of the team; they even heard some chant for some of their digital content producers — “Laurence Scott! Warriors TV!”

Curry, Durant and Thompson are among the top 10 most marketable players in the NBA based on awareness and appeal — with Curry coming in at No. 1 — according to E-Poll Market Research. 

“Anything that Steph does is just social media gold,” Fahey said during a brief pause in work on opening night.

The Warriors even utilize a software that alerts them when any of their social posts heat up.From a marketing and advertising standpoint, those numbers, and the experiences involved, are impossible to ignore.

“Every sponsor opportunity has to go through digital now,” said Fahey, the senior manager of digital experience. “A lot of ad dollars are going to social media.”


So much power is wielded at these millennial fingertips, yet the job itself still carries a catty stigma — it’s not yet entirely socially accepted as a true profession, yet fans rely on it. And the mix of reliance and disrespect sometimes turns to social media poison.

Perhaps one of the more recent tweets that drew Warrior Twitter’s ire came in a preseason game against the Lakers this year: a photo of Durant and James talking it up with a “These guys are pretty good” caption.

Some replies erupted at the rival player support and drew a few punches at the tweet’s source:

“Fire your social media intern. This is trash.”

“Really?! This is a weak post. Talk about stating the obvious. Geez! But it should be Steph not LeBroom up there. This is a Warriors post, right?”

All that noise hit a wall. The Warriors social team was blissfully unaware of any such controversy; all-too cognizant of the online poison this profession concocts, no one checks the official accounts’ mentions.

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So if you’ve taken issue publicly, on your personal social account, with one of their tweets or posted a cruel response to an Instagram or Facebook post, they don’t know and they don’t really care.

“The No. 1 rule we have is don’t read the comments,” Poole said as she sifted through a folder of GIFs to post following a Curry 3-pointer. “Because people can be mean, especially if they know they’re anonymous.

“So if you’re replying like crazy, chances are we won’t see it.”

Cracchiolo admits she’s checked before.

“Yeah, I’ll do it if I feel like being super depressed,” she said.

And tuning the outside noise out also helps this social team stay within themselves, relatively anonymous. Some social media producers, like Phayer, embrace their branded voice in harmony with their own social media voice. The Portland Trail Blazers’ Amara Baptist and the Minnesota Timberwolves’ Shahbaz Khan host a podcast, “Social on the Sideline”, about their experiences.

The Warriors staffers don’t mind staying a little further off the sideline when it comes to their personal social media presence. Some, like Fahey, don’t even bother with social media personally.

“It gets to the point where, if you’re around it that much, you just want to get away from it,” he said.

These are all new issues to deal with; balancing the naturally personal feel of social media with its obvious opportunity to attain something that once felt unattainable: relatable brand marketing. Just 10 years ago, none of these people could have predicted that they’d be posting content to social media platforms for a living.

Poole played basketball growing up, started out with the Warriors in their basketball camps and felt encouraged to do more social media when friends started asking her to caption their Instagram posts. Cracchiolo and Fahey studied journalism in college. Fahey started out with the Warriors in 2006 as an “E-marketing assistant” — very 2006 — and Cracchiolo worked for the Sacramento Kings’ social team for two years after graduation.

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Witt was studying electrical engineering at UCLA before he literally crashed into a guy on the Westwood campus giving out fliers for sports marketing internships and had an epiphany strong enough that he switched his major to history in order to graduate more quickly, catch up on some writing skills and start a career in sports. He recently left the Warriors for a new job at NBC Sports Bay Area.

Social media, in general, is still relatively young in this media landscape. This is the first generation taking on this beast, foraging the field and defining its boundaries still undiscovered as an actual profession. Tweeting for work, they all say, was never on the radar.

“Absolutely not,” Cracchiolo said. “I was capable of doing it, but did not think I’d ever be doing it for a job. And my parents, it totally goes over their head — it’s like, ‘oh, what’s Twitter?’”

For the average person, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are time wasters, curated news timelines, all-too forgiving platforms for everyone’s cursory musings and sometimes your weird relative’s political outbursts; one of those things parents like Cracchiolo’s, and maybe everyone else too, just don’t get.

NBA fans are so entrenched into Twitter during games that Twitter itself is championing #NBATwitter as a brand; all these people are logging on and spewing takes, unprovoked, free of charge. How, then, is social media work?

“I always think it’s funny when I see comments that are like ‘that intern is getting fired,’” Witt said. “This is not a small-time job, there’s a lot at stake here. You have to be clever, you have to be knowledgeable, you have to not only know your audience, but the platform itself.”

However casual his office was that December 2012 night, the Splash Brothers brainstorm it inspired gave the Warriors a legacy slogan and Witt a story for his great-grandchildren.

Powerful brands — and even superstar athletes — are indebted to youthful online spontaneity, and that’s just the media world we live in.

(Photo: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

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