Like a good proportion of the Scottish social media community we tried to help the 300 miles guys raise money for the CLIC Sargent childrens’ cancer charity.
Like the rest of the community we had high hopes and expectations of being able to harness the power of social media - specifically Twitter - to generate some noise and donations.
And, like many of those who did their bit, we’ve learned some things in the process about both the benefits and limitations of Twitter. We share some of these observations in this post.
But first our congratulations to Lee and Garry on their achievement. On Friday last they completed their epic 300 mile Outer Hebridean challenge in 57 hours & 10 minutes. They cycled the equivalent of 10 London Marathons, kayaked a half marathon and ran another marathon while ascending the height of Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Mount Snowdon combined. In the process they raised the best part of £10,000 for CLIC Sargent. Well done guys, a fantastic, inspirational achievement!
During their training and preparation for the event, Lee and Garry shared their experiences on their blog and through Twitter. They fully embraced both the virtual and real world aspects of networking as they captured the imagination of the Scottish social media scene.
Many of these people, perhaps most notably Mike Coulter, rallied round to help boost the profile of the challenge. Indeed, it was prompted by Mike’s frustration at slow conversion of Twitter buzz into money that we launched our own initiative.
We set out to make it as easy as possible to “monetise” Twitter on behalf of 300 Miles.
All people had to do was retweet (RT) our simple message and we’d donate 50p to the cause - up to a maximum of £300 for unique retweets.
We assumed that removing the need to actually donate yourself would turbo-charge the message and deliver an easy £300 for the charity. Indeed there was some internal debate as to the right level to set the donation per retweet. It was argued that at 50p we’d burn through the £300 in double-quick time and that 20p would be more appropriate.
How wrong we were.
The first Tweet went out from our Blondehaslearnt profile at 9.44 AM.
And, within 20 minutes we were being picked up as one of the most retweeted items on the planet…
But things quickly slowed down. We had been retweeted 40 times in the first 45 minutes. The first 31 retweets had the potential to reach 38,641 people (ignoring any overlap in followings of the people who retweeted us). But in the next 3 hours we added only 36 further retweets and things had slowed to a trickle.
By way of a boost we shared this information with a secondary tweet.
For a while this had the desired effect, but closer attention to the content of the retweets revealed that the further we went beyond the “inner circle” of people who knew the 300 miles guys, or at least knew about the challenge, the less likely we were to be retweeted.
In appears, quite rightly, that people don’t retweet lightly. And repeated scamming and spamming has hardened people against taking a charitable tweet at face value.
Some people, like @RicRoberts, took the time to check it out. Many others clearly didn’t and our message fell on the Twitter equivalent of stony ground.
The 140 character format of Twitter makes messages easy to digest and pass on, but it doesn’t allow for the richness and depth of communication that might perhaps have convinced people of the authenticity of the call to action.
In the end (by that I mean the fact that, at the time of writing, there hasn’t been a retweet for over 24 hours) we achieved 127 retweets with a maximum theoretical reach of 63,325 people. In other words a very loosely defined “response rate” of 0.2%. Would your average, sophisticated direct marketing charity outfit be happy with that? All comments welcome.
In conclusion, our main reflections on this quick and dirty, spontaneous piece of fund-raising activity are as follows:-
1) Things spread like wildfire on Twitter. Which is great if you have a piece of news that needs to travel fast. But wildfires have a habit of flaring up and burning out really quickly. Which is not so great if you’re looking for people to take any kind of action on the back of that news.
Twitter has a short attention span. It is a firework rather than a flare - blink, several other tweets roll in and you’ve missed it.
2) There are communities within communities on Twitter. Social media are at their most powerful when the ambient awareness for other people that you generate online is reinforced by face to face contact. This initiative worked well with the 300 miles inner circle but stuttered and quickly stalled once it moved a couple of “generations” beyond that.
3) Was our copywriting optimised for direct response? Could we have explained the offer, been more motivating, and allayed people’s authenticity concerns all in 140 characters? Indeed make that 120 characters or so given that we needed to leave room for the extra characters taken up by the process of retweeting.
