Last night, the team headed over to the Northern for the monthly social media cafe. With so many events happening in the digital world at the moment we don’t get along as often as we’d like to, but it’s a great place to meet people and chat all things social.
With presentations on TwitterTitters and Futuresonic to choose from – i opted for the presentation by Louise Boulton (and Linda Jones) on her recent fundraising activity for Comic Relief.
The dynamic duo, which expanded to a trio with the addition of a publisher, decided to create a book of short stories to raise money for Comic Relief and to use Twitter as the main medium to promote it.
With time against them (just three weeks from start to finish), they used Twitter to appeal for stories (and received over 70 submissions), found judges and even scooped a celebrity foreword to give the project media appeal.
Recognising the power of Twitter needed to be enhanced by a more detailed information source the team launched a blog to follow the success of the project.
The publisher decided that selling through lulu in an online or printed version would be the way forward, and although they hit barrier after frustrating barrier, they managed to get their book on sale 10 days before Comic Relief.
Being journalists, the creators had many a PR follower on Twitter and appealed to those to retweet their messages about sales of the book and their very entertaining TwitterTitters jokes to get people in the mood and drive awareness. After much persuading, they even managed to get Stephen Fry to retweet – and traffic to the blog spiked.
On the big day itself, a London journalist decided to take a pop at the campaign and insinuate that the activity wasn’t an official comic relief project – and the action of this one person sadly took the shine away from a campaign that sold 200 books and raised over £700 for the charity.
Tips from the team on people wanting to use social media as a tool: Recognise the power of the retweet (and plan for this with the characters you use), use small hash tags and build in ways to use other social media tools so that the campaign can be bookmarked.
Tips from us at Democracy PR to TwitterTitters: Twitter, while great, needs to be supported with an offline PR campaign and presence in other social networks and seeding the message on relevant communities and be prepared for when people have a pop at you (cos they always will), respond if required and then move on. Oh – and give yourself lots more time.
The book is still on sale and is very funny – buy your copy of TwitterTitters from lulu here.
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[...] the session on the interwebs. Jon Clements of the PR Media blog posts his take here and here’s Democracy PR’s Jennifer O’Grady’s helpful [...]
Hi,
Thanks for blogging about TwitterTitters – you offer some excellent advice and if it’s okay with you I would like to let you know that the steps you outline were/(and still are!) in place.
Media coverage included (achieved over a two-week period-ish!) a page lead in the Metro, a blink and you’ll miss it mention in the Guardian, newspaper reports across Staffordshire, the North West and the Midlands, plus regional BBC etc – pretty good going all things considered but there was a deliberate focus on Twitter as we wanted to see what would happen, there was massive support from bloggers and a facebook group.
As for being prepared for people to have a pop at us – we were and they did
It wasn’t a journalist who had a go, rather a student tweeter, as well as another blogger – I ignored the former and responded to the latter, the comments were quite constructive.
In terms of “seeding” the message with other communities, we did, particularly with creative writers – a specific and planned target group.
The time element was the most tricky thing I think, but then the book is still for sale and I hope people continue to buy it. But yes you are right more time would have been the more sensible way to go
. As you say, there were lots more hiccups behind the scenes so at the end of it, I was delighted to even see the product.
I wasn’t at the Social Media Cafe, that was my colleague Christina, and the “publisher” we brought on board was Lulu – the self publishing website.
Overall we achieved a lot – and as I say I hope we can continue to sell copies – I’ve had two books published previously and both have been steady sellers.
One thing I think I’d like to say is thank you to everyone who wrote, blogged or tweeted about TwitterTitters and if you would like to consider buying it, that would be proper bostin’
Here’s the link again:
http://www.lulu.com/content/6281246
All the best to you and thanks again.