#tweetsmart: 25 Twitter Projects to Help You Build Your Community

Introduction: The Content of Your Communication

At nearly every conference I attend I meet people who tell me, “I have no use for Twitter. You can’t say anything in 140 characters. I’d rather have a real conversation.” Obviously—as I’m the one writing this book—I feel differently. So, to all the doubters and skeptics, I offer the following story:

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My grandfather, “Mac” McDougall—like so many grandparents—moved to Florida when it came time for him to retire. His neighborhood was a flat rectangle, carved out of fields of orange groves, and tucked in beside a maze of golf courses. His street was a flat street in a grid of flat streets. His house was a single-level brown adobe home in a row of single-level brown adobe homes. At the end of his driveway was a green mailbox. At the end of every driveway was…a green mailbox.

We would visit him nearly every winter. We’d often drive the long journey down I-95 from New Hampshire to Florida, and 24 hours after climbing into the van—as my dad drove the van through the flat streets—I would see my grandfather’s house. Even as a small child I had an easy time picking out his house from all the rest. His was the only one with a 50-foot radio tower standing in the backyard.

My grandfather was a HAM radio operator. He had received his operator’s license in 1930 when he was just 15 years old. As a teenager, he taught himself how to build his own radios out of spare parts. He then served during WWII in a communications unit, and after the war he continued to communicate with other “HAMmers” all over the world. Upon retirement, he moved to this adobe home and set up his own radio room—complete with a radio tower outside his window.

In the late evenings during our visits he would excuse himself and shuffle to his radio room for his weekly appointments with his radio buddies. Sometimes I’d sit beside him—marveling at the knobs and lights all around the cluttered room—while he tapped out his messages in Morse code, laughed, and waited in anticipation for the beeps and boops that would reply.

“Oh marvelous!” he’d say. “Janice had her baby!”

I—being six—didn’t know Janice and didn’t care much that she’d had her baby. But I could watch for hours as these sporadic beeps and boops somehow triggered outbursts of joy and happy tears from my grandfather.

I would learn many years later that my grandfather was speaking to a man in New Zealand named John. They met over the airwaves and quickly became friends—tapping back and forth to each other about their love of radios, golf, and the additions to their families.

Every week my grandfather would shuffle down the hall in the late evenings for his scheduled chat with John who—at that same time—was shuffling out of bed to start his day in New Zealand.

When my grandfather passed away in 2007 it had been over twenty years since I last sat with him in his radio room. At the time of his death he held the longest continuously-active HAM radio operators license in the United States—77 years.

In a long procession on a sad day, we drove down the flat streets—past the orange groves and golf courses—to the funeral home. Family and friends filled the room. Many of whom I hadn’t seen in years and many of whom I’d never met. And, in introducing myself to some of the folks, I met a small white-haired man who stood alone at the back of the room. “Hello,” he said in a funny accent. “I’m John.”

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Real relationships have been built on forms of communication offering far fewer than 140 characters. The human animal is capable of extracting real and meaningful information from countless forms of communication—whether it’s Morse code, or a wink, a nervous foot, a billboard, or even a “tweet.”

The content of your communication is important—not what carries it.

Table of Contents

Introduction
How To Use This Book
The Projects

1. The Radio Contest
2. The Tweet & Eat
3. Hashtag Games
4. Twitter Market Research
5. Twitter AdLibs
6. Twitter Haiku
7. Photo Caption Contest
8. Treasure Hunt
9. Twitter BOGO
10. Discussion Groups
11. Tweet Bombs
12. Web Scavenger Hunt
13. Random Retweet
14. A Picture is Worth 7.14 Tweets
15. The Star in the Crowd
16. Digital Hide & Seek
17. Smile, You’re on Camera
18. Half-Off Hangman
19. Topic Quotes
20. Twitter Trivia
21. Twitter Telephone
22. Where In The World Is…?
23. I Feel So Close To You Right Now
24. I’ve Got the Golden Ticket
25. Real-World Scavenger Hunt

Be the 10th Tweeter

This is the first project in the book because it is a strategy that is both simple for beginners as well as special to me. This project explains how to run the same contest on Twitter that provided me with my “A-HA!” moment. Like many people, I was originally a skeptic that business and social media could mix. Like I said in the Introduction, I still shudder when I hear or use the phrase “social media marketing.” This contest proved to me that the two worlds could collide—and that the result can be spectacular.

This contest is a adaptation of the old “Be the 10th Caller”-style contest radio stations have been running for decades. However, instead of asking people to call in, we’re asking people to send tweets. So, in effect, this is a “Be the 10th tweeter”-style contest.

For the price of some sort of prize—a coupon, a product, a free hour of service, etc.—you can use this contest to directly engage your audience with your products and services—and in doing so, recommend you to their followers.

The idea is simple: at the same time every week, invite your followers into your online store or web site and ask them to tweet out a link to the product of yours they’d like to win. The 10th (or 12th or 50th, etc.) person to send such a tweet after the defined time, wins the product he or she has chosen.

Before you can run the actual contest, you will need to do some preparation work in order for it to be most effective.

Choose a time you will run the contest every week. Plan to do it during the work day—as that’s when most people are at their computers and looking for something to do or trying to avoid something they don’t want to do. Be sure to run the contest at the same time every week so that your followers can plan to show up and play regularly.

The first step is to place a ‘Tweet This’ button on all the product and/or service pages on your web site which you’d like to make available for the contest. If you’re using a modern content management system (CMS) like WordPress or Drupal to manage your site, you will likely only need to update one product page template file.

Using the HTML code Twitter provides through their Tweet button creation tool (http://twitter.com/goodies), create the JavaScript code you will need to copy and paste into your web site’s HTML. Fill in the field that designates that the button should include your username in each tweet sent. This will allow you to track the tweets your followers send from your site.

This button will give your visitors the ability to recommend your individual products or service out to their followers with a simple click of the new button on any product’s page.

Once the button is installed and functioning, write a blog post which explains the rules and the workings of the contest. When it comes time to promote the contest, you can point people to the blog post where everything is laid out and made clear.

In the hours before the designated time you’ve chosen to run the contest, promote the contest every so often by tweeting out a link to the blog post you’ve written. Do not over-do it. It’s easy to get excited and over-promote the contest. But annoying your followers with constant promotion will only turn them off. Use a light touch.

Also, when promoting the contest, don’t just stick to Twitter. Try to enlist the help of bloggers, Facebook users, and newsletter owners you know who might be interested in helping you promote the contest. A well-placed and well-timed article about your contest can bring in a good number of new people.

The blog post you’ve written explaining the contest should invite people browse through your online store in the minutes before the contest is scheduled to start—let’s say, for the sake of example, the contest is run every Tuesday at 2 o’clock. The visitors to your store will be looking for a product they would like to win that week. When 2 o’clock rolls around, send out a Tweet announcing that the contest has started and that anyone browsing the store should begin clicking the “Tweet This” button on the page of the product they hope to win.

You, as the contest manager, can track these Tweets by running a search for your username at http://search.twitter.com or through your Twitter management software like TweetDeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com) or HootSuite (http://www.hootsuite.com). As the tweets start flying, you begin counting. When you have counted up to the 10th tweeter, you have your winner and the contest for the week is over.

Contact the winner directly—usually via a direct message—to send your congratulations and request his or her mailing address and other required information. Plop the prize in the mail and you’re done!

In the early weeks of running this contest you can expect low numbers and slow response rates. You might have 4 or 5 people play in the first week and therefore you should set your “Be the ‘Nth’ tweeter” number low. Every week however, because the participants are recommending you out to their followers in their contest tweets, your contest numbers will grow. In a few weeks’ time you can expect 30 to 40 people participating in your contest every week.

I realize that 30 to 40 people does not sound like many participants. But, keep in mind that during the course of the 10-minute contest each of those 30 to 40 people is sending out a tweet with a link back to your site to all of their followers to read. When gauging the effectiveness of your contest, add up not only the number of folks who played, but also the number of folks who received the tweeted link recommendations. You will be astonished how quickly you can reach 20,000 (or more) people with only a few dozen people participating in your contest.

Advanced Strategies

Once you’ve been doing this contest for a few months and you feel as though you’ve got a handle on how it works, there are a few things you can do to improve it’s effectiveness.

Landing a Big Fish

It is great to get a bunch of individuals and loyal customers to participate in your contest, but it is even better to get some powerhouse Twitter users who operate in your niche to play along as well.

For example, if you own a shoe store and use the contest to give away a free pair of shows every week, you should try to get the Twitter marketers at companies like Runner’s World magazine, Dr. Scholl’s, or even Nike to play along as well. These companies often have large numbers of followers and they are often more than willing to participate in a fun contest that suits their audience. This is a quick way to double or triple the number of people playing in the contest—and the more people who play, the more promotion your contest gets, and the more people who play…and so on.

Trivia Questions

If you run this contest the same way every week it won’t take long for it to become stale and less interesting for your audiences. Therefore, you should spice it up every so often by throwing in a fun bonus question. In this iteration of the contest, you would give away two prizes—one to the normal contest winner, but also one to the first person to answer the bonus question correctly.

Along with every bonus question, you might want to provide a link to a page on your web site—or another appropriate (or fun)—web site where the participants can find the answer.

For example, during your shoe store’s contest one week you could provide a link to your own site’s About Us page—which contains a long description of each of your office dogs—along with the question, “Of the four dogs in our office, which little ball of sunshine ate my $300 Nike’s?!”

This type of question draws people to your site’s About Us page where they learn that your company is run by humans with a sense of humor—which is always a good thing for your customers to learn.

Twitter Integration

You can tell your friends which online news stories are your favorites. You can tell your friends which blog post you’re reading. Why can’t you tell your friends anything you’re reading…in print? This book is the first to feature print-to-Twitter integration using the magic of QR codes. The opening page of each project has a “Tweet This” QR code which you can scan with your mobile device to send a Tweet to your friends. Scan any project’s QR code to let your friends know your thoughts and reactions.

Here are some examples. Try scanning them with your phone! Click on each image if you need a larger version.