Tweeting the live local challenge

Twitter, the latest social networking tool to reach global proportions, offers a great deal of potential, and also a great deal of hype.

Media outlets around the world took notice of Twitter this year, and its use as an organising and information tool in Iran after elections in June put to rest suggestions that the microblogging platform was a web novelty.

Even before Iran, various marketing “gurus” were emerging to offer expertise in the fledgling service, and web strategy sites had begun to publish top 10 lists of tips for marketing your products with Twitter – a sure sign that a meme is in vogue.

OK, great. But if you’re doubtful of the gurus’ expertise and you don’t have a huge political uprising thirsting for information, what good is Twitter?

Our experience during the launch of the live local project earlier this year is that Twitter is great for telling real stories in real time. When I feel like I’m being marketing to by any of the few dozen people and groups I follow on Twitter, I stop paying attention immediately. But when I’m exposed to something real and genuine – words that often describe non-profit and Local Government projects – my interest perks up.

The live local project gives Australians an online place to share stories about improving their communities. It’s based on the idea that various efforts to live more sustainable lives – eating food grown locally, walking, cycling and using public transport, creating friendships with our neighbours – go a long way in making neighbourhoods more livable and more enjoyable.

Just over a year ago, NASA created a Twitter account for its Mars lander. A NASA staffer tweeted regularly in the first person, building a narrative as the spacecraft performed its tasks elsewhere in the solar system. The public loved it, and it accumulated around 10,000 followers (which was a lot in the earlier days of Twitter) who asked questions, some of them very technical, and followed its every move.

NASA’s success in making a nerdy space robot interesting to the world informed our search for a clever and cost-effective way to spread the word about live local.

We tracked down two of Sydney’s most influential and popular Twitter users – Rebecca Varidel (@frombecca) and Kate Carruthers (@kcarruthers), both very busy, successful, multitasking, multi-careered women, with over 15,000 followers between them. Once we found them, we gave them a challenge: live as locally as possible for a week, and talk, blog and tweet about it.

Varidel and Carruthers loved the project’s objectives, and both happily accepted the challenge. They spent a bit of time preparing (and waiting for us to be ready), and began tweeting about the challenge in advance. A #livelocal hash tag emerged (adding the hash sign to a word turns into a quasi-official topic that people can search for), and discussions began to grow organically around various themes – all before the site’s official launch.

When the challenge began, several thousand people joined Varidel and Carruthers on their journey – a few of them doing the challenge themselves, and the rest sharing the experience by reading and retweeting the women’s narrative as it emerged.

“I had the world watching,” Varidel said. “The response was enormous, and I received Twitter messages all day every day during the challenge. I also received offers of assistance to provide backyard produce and acreage produce in Sydney online, as well as suppliers and markets where I could buy the food from within the region limitations.”

A month or so after the end of the challenge, the #livelocal tag is alive and well in Twitter searches, appearing in conversations about 100 mile diets, sustainable farming, smiling at neighbours, and on and on. More importantly, thousands of people shared in a part of live local, and understood it not as a product or a service, but an experience, a story and a movement.

When used intelligently, Twitter can be personal; your messages may only go to hundreds or perhaps thousands of people, but each of them experiences the message as part of a dialogue with you alone. Instead of seeming like a blunt campaign, Twitter has the power to seem like a conversation – and, today, conversations are far more effective than marketing messages.

There are many tips on how to best use Twitter, most either painfully obvious or of dubious validity. Like all technology tools, it needs to be tailored to your unique context and the project’s goals. If you absolutely must get on Twitter today, our back-of-envelope advice is this: Engage in conversations on Twitter first, grow a following and then experiment with different ways of delivering council services or specific campaign messages that are about the two way communication at which Twitter excels. The golden rule, though, is to keep it personal, compelling … and short – 140 characters, to be precise!

Name: John

Web Site: http://digitaleskimo.net

Bio: John MacFarlane is a writer, editor and producer who has long balanced nerdy technological pursuits with nerdy cultural pursuits. John enjoys media theory, satire, bad architecture, outdoor exercise and vegetarian meat substitutes, among other things. John holds a Masters degree in Media Studies from Concordia University in Montreal (focus areas: political rhetoric, civic engagement) and degrees in journalism (Concordia) and electrical engineering. He enjoys playing ultimate frisbee, riding a bike and misses winter sports because Sydney does not have winter. John has worked for major newspapers, global film projects and new media firms. He is a senior producer at Digital Eskimo.