Ashley Kerekes is not the Ashes (Picture: Twitter/Umpf)

It’s not every day that you have to publicly refute suggestions that you are a sporting event.

But that was exactly the course of action taken by Ashley Kerekes, who lives in the city of Westfield, Massachusetts. More than two and a half years ago, she was forced into declaring on Twitter: ‘I’m not a freaking cricket match!’

The confusion was caused by her Twitter handle: @theashes. To her and her boyfriend (now her fiancé) Dan, it was merely the sweet nickname he had bestowed upon her.

But to anyone from England or Australia who loves their cricket, those two words signified the greatest prize in their sport.




During the 2010/2011 Ashes down under, Kerekes found her Twitter feed bombarded with messages about the cricket.

She denied that she was the Ashes on Twitter in November 2010. Hundreds of retweets later and she had become something of a social media star.

When the attention began, she was initially annoyed by the constant buzzing and beeping from her phone as the Twitter notifications piled in. But it wasn’t long before Kerekes shrugged her shoulders and went with the flow, chatting about a sport she knew nothing about to a growing barmy army of followers, which at one point reached 13,500.

Along the way, she developed something of an affection for the game and before long a Twitter campaign had been started in her honour.

Through the hashtag #gettheashestotheashes, users called for Kerekes to be sent to Australia for the match itself. Australian social media management company One Small Planet duly obliged, flying her to Sydney for the fifth Ashes test at the beginning of 2011. She met Australia’s then prime minister Julia Gillard and was interviewed for BBC radio’s Test Match Special.

‘The entire experience is pretty unforgettable,’ said Kerekes. ‘It was unbelievable. People I tell the story to compare it to winning the lottery.’

‘It was so strange and fun. I remember going back to the hotel in Sydney after a TV interview and a woman stopped me and said: “Didn’t I just see you on TV?” Mind-blowing.’

Since her trip to Sydney, the 25-year-old has got engaged and had a son, Garrett, who is almost one year old. She works as a pre-school teacher in a childcare centre, writes for a parenting blog and has her own online Etsy shop, where she even sells stuffed cricket balls.

When all the tweets mentioning her began, Kerekes wasn’t exactly overjoyed.

‘At the very beginning, when I was being awoken in the night from notifications to my phone, it was certainly irritating,’ she recalled. However, she quickly learned to embrace her new-found Twitter fame.

For this summer’s Ashes, which began in Nottingham this week, she has a new masthead on her Twitter page, designed by Leeds-based social media agency Umpf. It reads: ‘This poor girl has nothing to do with the cricket.’



However, that’s not strictly true. ‘I will definitely be engaging with cricket fans,’ she said of this year’s Ashes. ‘I’ve made friends with so many of them over the past two years that I couldn’t let them down now.

‘Several weeks ago, people started reminding me that the Ashes were coming. The vast majority of my current twitter followers are cricket fans that have stayed on for two years and they’re the ones tweeting me now. I’ve definitely been more prepared for it to happen this time.’

It’s a tricky business, Twitter. Sometimes getting things right there can be difficult. When some users mistake you for a sporting event, there’s not much you can do.

‘She turned it around and embraced it. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,’ said Adrian Johnson, owner of Umpf.

‘From this whole innocent Twitter nickname she has given herself a much bigger community. It’s probably enriched her online experience.’

Twitter has a history of cases of mistaken identity. Last year, Natalie Westerman, a teacher from Newcastle, was bombarded with a complaints from bank customers because of her Twitter handle, @natwest. That account has now disappeared.

Two months ago, in the wake of the attack in Woolwich in which soldier Lee Rigby was killed, energy company EDF was targeted on Twitter by some users who confused it with the English Defence League (EDL).

When Manchester United won the premier league last season, many Twitter users wanted to offer their congratulations to the team’s prolific striker, Robin van Persie, who goes by the nickname RvP. Unfortunately, the Twitter handle @rvp belongs to Ravi Visvesvaraya Sharada Prasad, an IT consultant in India.


Like Kerekes before him, Prasad was reticent about all the attention at first, but now tweets regularly about football and van Persie. On Twitter yesterday, he even asked what @theashes thought about yesterday’s action at Trent Bridge. To find out, all he had to do was check out Kerekes’s Twitter feed – she has been posting regular cricket updates.

‘Who knows, she might get a slot commentating for the next test,’ said Johnson.

He advised brands to take a leaf out of her book and try to run with things where possible when a mistake is made.

Some campaigns have fallen foul of their own Twitter hashtags, with the launch of singer Susan Boyle’s new album last year perhaps the most notorious example. Try reading #susanalbumparty a few times and keeping a straight face.

But despite the embarrassment and mockery that followed this hashtag, it might actually have been clever social media marketing.

‘I wonder whether there was a deliberate attempt to generate publicity,’ said Johnson. ‘With Susan Boyle, no one has ever come out and said that was a deliberate hashtag. However, it didn’t do Susan Boyle’s campaign any harm whatsoever because everybody was talking about it.’

If nothing else, it showed that those behind the album launch campaign were human.

‘Twitter and social media in general are not mediums for broadcasting sales messages,’ said Johnson. ‘The online community expects personality, they expect to see behind the scenes, they expect something different. And they expect a human voice.’