Clicking and Screaming

No, this is not yet another post on the Long Tail but a look at two recent bouts of Twitter activity. Both were short term in nature and had differing results.

The first was the Inaugural Blood Drive Tweetup which took place on 3rd July, neatly timed ahead of annual spike in blood demands caused by the national holiday. An initial announcement went out on Sunday 29th June on the blog of Austin resident and blogger Michelle Greer. It encouraged everyone to sign up to donate blood between 10am and 4pm at a particular location and to spread the word by blogging, tweeting and joining the Facebook group. As well as generating a huge amount of buzz on Twitter and the blogosphere far more importantly it led to 100 donations that day, may from first time donors.

Hopefully those first timers will keep going back to donate and other people who couldn’t make the actual Blood Drive Tweetup donated elsewhere or will do so in future.

The drive received some mainstream media attention too and is a perfect example of how social media can create something of meaning offline that then also feeds back into generating more online conversation.

Verizon’s Twittering Teddy was also a short term engagement, using social media tools to raise awareness, this time of Verizon’s FiOS Internet service but seems to have been far less warmly received by some.

The Twittering Teddy is one of the DIY projects to be found on Verizon’s My Home 2.0 site and is basically a hacked Teddy Ruxpin which will speak your twitter stream for you, obviously enabled by the super fast fibre optics as provided by Verizon FiOS. For a brief two week period you could tweet directly to the original and watch the cuddly critter speak your tweet via the www.2pointhome.com/teddy site. After then it was auctioned on eBay for charity.

Apart from actually being fairly scary – really check the making of making of video from about 2.04 onwards and tell me that it isn’t scarier than Daleks – the short period of the activity really limited how successful this campaign could have been.

It seems the campaign was started simply by the teddy following 20 key people on twitter, followed by some emails with more detail, which makes the coverage it received impressive but I feel they could’ve have achieved more if they had let the teddy twitter on for a bit longer.

It does seems as if initially the campaign was going to last longer, an article about its launch in PR Week explained:

After 10 days, Verizon will auction off the bear for charity on eBay, while the virtual Teddy continues his spokesperson role via a Twitter page on the My Home 2.0 site, reporting from behind the scenes of the show, sending out links, and answering questions.

Verizon Hires a Teddy Bear that Twitters, PR Week

Which a spokesperson from Verizon’s PR company backed that up on the same article.

[We] needed a spokesperson, an ongoing voice that people will listen to because everyone is trying to come up with a novel Twitter campaign.

Jason Chupick, a PR consultant at Campfire, PR Week

Yet as stands, its last tweet was five days ago and it only has 370 followers and, assuming it followed everyone who messaged it, only 430 at its peak. Which means that Verizon has lost out on the opportunity to easily engage with those 400 or so people and keep them updated on the other various DIY projects the Verizon gurus are putting together. The short term-ism of the engagement has also led to some calling it a stunt, though I really don’t feel that was the intent behind the idea.

Verizon didn’t need to go quite as far as the example set by Burger King with Subservient Chicken, which first appeared back in 2004 but it is still there and ready to follow orders four years later, but I think it would’ve got a lot more out of its twitter engagement if it had lasted a lot longer.