The inaugural Newcastle Craft Beer Week ran November 21st to November 27th 2011 

Over the two weeks from November 17th through to November 30th talk about the event was amplified using Twitter by One Small Planet driven primarily through its @AusBeerFestival account.

The exposure for #NewcastleCraftBeer week exceeded a million impressions on Twitter and reached 123,775 people. 

A Case Study 

Originally published on the One Small Planet website on December 1st 2011. This is a summary with some background to how it worked.


Newcastle Craft Beer Week was a series of events held throughout the week which was coordinated by Corey Crooks, the licensee of The Albion Hotel and culminating with The Craft Beer Festival at Warners at the Bay Hotel, run by Mark Mead, Bottle-shop Manager at Hotel. The significance of these two venues is this: The Albion Hotel has the widest selection of craft beers on tap of any pub in Newcastle and the bottle-shop at Warners at the Bay stocks over 1000 imported and Australian beers including over 400 craft and boutique beers. 


While several participating pubs in Newcastle have Twitter and Facebook accounts only three of these venues chose to use social media as part of their overall promotional mix. The team at One Small Planet assisted The Prince of Wales Hotel, The Clarendon Hotel, and The Albion Hotel. Each applied slightly different strategies to the same end. 


One Small Planet also assisted some of the brewers attending the festival events. 

#NewcastleCraftBeer 

To focus attention on the Twitter conversations about the event we created the hash tag, #NewcastleCraftBeer. The One Small Planet Twitter account, @AusBeerFestival commenced posting tweets around November 17th. Each Tweet carried in it the #NewcastleCraftBeer tag. For the first half of Newcastle Craft Beer Week through to the Thursday several hundred people had attended events at various venues and there were 537 Tweets bearing the tag #NewcastleCraftBeer. These Tweets reached 57,566 people – close to one hundred times the number of people who had attended events. 

The Strategies and implementation: 

Throughout the week there were tweets posted about subject matter relevant to Newcastle Craft Beer Week, pictures, links, quotes and occasionally promotion about events and venues. The idea was to keep the conversation alive all week both during the day and into the evening while events were in progress. Again, the hash tag is an important component to keep people easily informed and interested. This is particularly important for those who were not attending events or not even in Newcastle. This way, twitter word of mouth about the venues, the brewers, brands and in fact Newcastle City is being talked about 


During some events One Small Planet via @AusBeerFestival tweeted live. More about 'live tweeting' at an event coming ...