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Last night’s Social Media Cafe Manchester, the 6 month anniversary of the events was a fantastic reminder of just how quickly social media has gripped the imagination of the British public.

Make that how quickly Twitter has gripped the imagination of the British public.

I attended the Twitter Titters session at yesterday’s unconference-style face-to-face social networking event(!).  There’s more details on the other session by Futuresonic founder Drew Hemment here.

Hosted by Louise Bolotin and Christina McDermott, two thirds of the team behind the Twitter Titters book put together to raise money for Comic Relief through Twitter, it was a fascinating insight into how to use Twitter to raise money for charity and promote a book on the web. You can follow Louise Bolotin and Christina McDermott on Twitter.

Already, there are some great write ups about 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 overview.

What follows are my notes from the event:

The Idea

Twitter Titters was put together in 48 hours after Linda Jones was inspired by @twitchhiker and a book created from a blog for Comic Relief a couple of years ago.  @twitchhiker describes one man’s trip from Newcastle to New Zealand organised solely through Twitter.

Word spread via followers.  There was a 10 day gap between the call for short story entries and the deadline so it was an incredibly frenetic process.

Contributors

Received 70 submissions.  In addition Twitter was used to find the panel of judges.  There was one exception though, Martin Millar, a celebrated sci-fi author who was a personal contact of Louise.

The project gained from Louise and Linda’s contacts as journalists; they are followed by lots of PR people on Twitter.  One PR company took on the job of promoting it. She didn’t mention who…

Craig McGinty did the blog, which was updated daily at one point.

The judging panel had a week to read 70 short stories and monologues which were then whittled down to a shortlist by the organising team.

The cover artist was also found on Twitter.

The book was (is) sold as an eBook and print on demand on Lulu.com.

The Production process

Christina, who has a background in print thought the whole process of publishing the book on Lulu would take 12 hours.

It took 7 days, if you include problems with the process (more on that later) and email exchanges with the rest of the team.

Her advice:  whatever time you think you need (to do such a project), double it.

How to publish a book on Lulu (abridged):

• Upload the Word file representing the book
• Upload images as PDFs

When she started uploading, she started Twittering about it and Lulu started following her on Twitter.  And gave tips.

Christina shared that she had a few problems with the actual production process, mostly to do with the fact that she doesn’t have the best internet connection.

Early Stage Promotion for the Book

Sarah Hartley of the Manchester Evening News Mancunian Way blog blogged about the book early on and also featured it in a podcast.

Dave Spikey, comedian and writer of popular Channel 4 TV show Phoenix Nights got involved because his manager was on Twitter.  Contributed a chapter out of his forthcoming book to the project.

Christina also wrote about it in City Life (which she writes for) and got her colleagues involved.

Very organic process.

Lots of blog entries about the book now in Google.

Though fraught with technical problems she thinks online publishing is a great process and Lulu one of the best platforms.

However everything took twice as long.

More on the time commitment

The whole process spanned February 9th to March 13th.

Louise estimated it would take a weekend to do the copy editing for the entries shortlisted.  Writing the introduction, credits and all the copyediting stretched that to 4 days.

Lulu provided a template for a pocket-sized hardcover book (I think that’s what she said) which she used to do all the copy editing.

However, when this was uploaded by Christina, it somehow turned into the A4 template!

Linda’s carefully edited typeface went from 9 point to 36 point!

This means that the book you receive if you opt for ‘print by demand’ has an incredibly large typeface, something Christine’s grand dad is grateful for!

Both were really happy ‘they physically made a book’ even though it was pretty frenetic.

To promote it, Louise sent messages to followers of really popular people on Twitter.

She happens to follow and be followed by national treasure, wit and hugely popular Twitterer, Stephen Fry and did what she could to get his attention.

Incredibly difficult to get the attention of high profile Twitterers.

Set up the #twittertitters hashtag which was used to share silly jokes as well as info about the book.

The ultimate deadline for the book was Red Nose Day 2009, 13th March.

They aimed to have it ready by Tuesday the week before, i.e. 10 days before Red Nose Day 2009.

Results/Achievements

Sold 200 copies. Which they thought was disappointing.  Promotion was through Twitter and a newswire used by the PR industry.  Raised around £700.00.

Can’t follow where the sales came from.

Most of the sales were from outside Manchester, however.  Less than 6 personal sales.

Libel and Slander

On Red Nose Day, Louise and the rest of the team were shocked to observe that a journalist based down south was posting accusations about the integrity of the TwitterTitters campaign on Twitter.

The accusation was that Twitter Titters team had not received official endorsement from Comic Relief and as such were ‘scammers’, Louise’s words not mine.

I’ve no idea who the journalist was and don’t really care as their identity is beside the point.  What was interesting was how the team dealt with what was very uncharitable behaviour on the most important day of their campaign.

The Twitter Titters team had gone through the process of registering their idea on the Comic Relief website, linking it with the foundation behind the entire fundraising mega event.

The Twitter Titters blog helped somewhat with dealing with the fallout that came with this negative attack as a rebuttal and response was subsequently posted on there.  I think this is what Louise and Craig McGinty (in the audience) said.  Anyone care to correct me?

I suggested that the team could have dealt with some of this horrible attempt to glean social capital at their expense by sharing some of the planning stages of the Twitter Titters process on the blog.

As someone else shared at the session, social media tools make it so easy to share information that if someone wants to slur you they can.

Other things overlooked

Social bookmarking integration
The team forgot to “put the campaign on Digg”.  This was done for them by the PR company that was involved.

No marketing strategy
The idea was put together by journalists and not marketing or PR specialists.   It “ran on emotion” rather than after planning.

However, despite all the angst, don’t let their pitfalls put you off doing a similar project, they added.

I suggested they look at running the campaign in chunks next time, e.g doing a Chapter at a time and getting Twitter and online support for the project in stages.

They said they would love to help others launch similar projects on Twitter using the experience they have gained from Twitter Titters.

I also suggested that some of the behind the scenes planning done on email could have been done on a blog to save some of the ‘going public with issues as they happened’ that became necessary.

However, I do think there is a trade off between planning on the web and behind closed doors.

They also set up a Facebook page and raised support on the official Comic Relief Facebook page.

Some of the team regret not blogging as much.

Christina felt she could have shared a lot more about the problems with publishing the book, for example.

Too Long A Hashtag
The long #twittertitters hash tag was a problem as it often got truncated or even lost between retweets.

The hashtag stream for #twittertitters is not as comprehensive as it should be, Louise said.  It would have worked better if they used a shorter hashtag.

Someone else ventured that it is becoming a science to prepare a tweet so that it can be retweeted.

One tip for future Twitter fundraisers:

Use a short hashtag and be aware that the maximum number of characters for a tweet suitable for retweeting is 100.

That’s it. Or at least, that’s how far my notes went!

Over to you.

I posted this because I know a couple of writers looking at using Twitter to promote their new books.  If you are one such person, do you think a promotional push on the level of the Twitter Titters campaign could be helpful?

If not, what do you think about the Twitter Titters team’s approach to dealing with negative feedback about their campaign online?

Please share in the comments!