TINDER SURPRISE - I tried using Tinder as a professional networking platform and here is what did (not) happen

A case of online dating, viral marketing, and, of course, innovation.

"For the ones that pay close attention to my activity on social media this article comes as no surprise — you can also say it comes in high demand. Both the people that have been following my activity mentioning Tinder in my Instagram stories during the summer, and those who came to the events where I was a speaker were equally teased by my usual declaration “I started hacking Tinder: I cannot say anything right now, follow me and you’ll get to know more about my experiment soon.”

The tease went usually far above my expectations, being one of the top things that came to mind to people when they approached me, both online and in real life: the usual “hey, you’re the one that always comes up in my LinkedIn feed with videos!” started to be paired with “…oh and I’ve read something about you and Tinder!”. Awkward for many — certainly not for me, who realized the big opportunity behind this label instead. But before digging deep into the experiment, let me take a step back and explain which was the real reason behind my brand being associated with the dating app.

It all started on February, 19th, 2019, the date of my TinderGate. I was laying down in my hotel room in Milan, after a long work day and just before getting ready for aperitivo and dinner. I was quite bored and started scrolling through my phone, opening several apps without really paying specific attention to any of them — until I found myself opening Tinder and swiping profiles. And that’s when it happened.

I bumped into the profile of a guy called Philipp — it might have looked like the random profile of a random blonde guy that was visiting Milan by the photos he had uploaded — selfies mainly — and the caption he had chosen: “Looking for my model. In Milan for two nights, better be quick.” With the Milano Fashion Week happening, that as well sounded totally random.

But there was something unusual about it all: and it was his first picture in the profile, that depicted a football player dressed in a green and white shirt in action against a… nerazzurri! My eye could not help but get caught, as an interista myself: it was the pic of a player from Rapid Vienna, the team that my favorite side from Serie A, Inter Milan, was going to face later that week in the second-leg of the double draw of the Europa League competition. The player in the picture I did not know — and that is probably one of the things that, almost unconsciously, led me to swipe right.

Yep, you heard that right. I swiped right. And guess what? He had swiped right too! For those who are not familiar: in the Tinder world, swiping right means you liked someone’s profile and would like to chat with them — but Tinder only allows you to do so if the other person liked you back — they probably do so to avoid unwanted attentions and awkward online friendzones. Basically, you need a double swipe for a match. A very different match than the one that Philipp, a midfielder in one of the top football teams in Austria, was supposed to play a couple of days later. Thinking of the pun, and the coincidence of me matching a footballer, I burst out laughing and not realizing it would be probably better to just go forward and message him in the first place, I could not help but tweet about the whole situation, which I already found hilarious:

As you might realize from the numbers and to my utter surprise, the tweet went viral and my phone suddenly became hot, really hot (you are free to give the term hot in this sentence the interpretation you prefer). The thing blew up to a point to which, just less than a couple of hours later while I was probably sipping my Crémant de Jura, I get an Instagram message from a journalist working at La Gazzetta dello Sport, the most important sports newspaper in Italy, saying something by the lines of “is this true? Like… for real?” to what he got an answer like “yes, why wouldn’t it be if I tweeted a screenshot of it?”. To be honest, and looking back, I am still 100% sure the profile was real, and the fact that when my TinderGate went viral he not only immediately proceeded to delete the chat and the profile, but also got his club to defend him with a tweet that mentioned him being in a “very happy relationship with his girlfriend for 8 years” and that was fairly doubtful to say the least, just looking like further piece of evidence to me (excusatio non petita, accusatio manifesta).

Anyways, just as the tweet was not getting enough exposure, the Gazzetta decided to report the story in an article that, as you might expect by now, just increased the virality of it all and got reposted by any other sports website in Italy, as well as the other important newspapers, television and media in general. Also, for the international flavor of the case, this piece of news went well beyond the Italian frontiers, landing in websites all over Europe and the world — as an example of it, I legit received a call from a friend in Spain asking worriedly “is this you the Marta Basso I’ve been hearing about on the radio? But miarma, what have you done?!”

If you know a little bit about viral marketing you realize this piece of news would have just been forgotten in a matter of weeks, if not days, even considered the spicy details — more than a footballer using a dating app, a woman doing so, oh what a piece of news this is! -. But I realized that there was opportunity to be exploited in the platform and I was determined not to let go of it, also because of my internet nickname that had gone from “the one from LinkedIn” to “the one from LinkedIn AND Tinder”."

Full story on Medium: Tinder Surprise