Live Event Tweeting...

From a quiet book store in Beaumont Street, Hamilton, Newcastle in New South Wales came a tweet from @onesmallplanet

Live Tweeting a Book Signing

Case Study

One Small Planet reported the goings-on at a book signing event by live tweeting on the night. It was in a suburban book store in Hamilton, Newcastle, NSW. There were about 30 people in attendance at the store. However, using Twitter, live, the audience expanded to more than 25,000.

The Price Of Life is the story of Australian photojournalist Nigel Brennan who was abducted in Somalia and held for ransom. His ordeal lasted over 400 days.

The book store runs a Twitter account - @Macleansbooks - and the store owners understand the potential of Twitter and the real-time web. The book’s author has a Twitter account called @thedirtyhostage which is ably assisted by Kimberly Ramplin who is @KimboRamplin on Twitter. Together with One Small Planet this team set out to expand the reach of the book signing on the night with live tweeting.

Before the event a look at the reach of the term “priceoflife” in tweets showed that there were no tweets using that term and there hadn’t been in the three days prior to the book signing on 1 September 2011.

 

The event got underway at 6.00 PM. It was an interview format in which the ABC, 1233 Newcastle’s Afternoons presenter, Carol Duncan (@CarolDuncan on Twitter) interviewed Nigel Brennan (@thedirtyhostage) and his sister and sister-in-law, the other two co-authors of the book. It was anticipated that the interview would last about 30 minutes but this is a fascinating story and with questions from the audience both in the store and on Twitter it was over an hour before it reluctantly wrapped up.

This sort of format lends itself to a live Twitter reporting, enabling  Q&A type tweets, Twitpics (like @CarolDuncan with @thedirtyhostage), and quirky and compelling facts. This snippet from Nigel’s sister, as a tweet was retweeted.

The next morning, following the event, we saw, that from a standing start, with zero use of the term’priceoflife’, the reach grew to more than 25,000 and generated over 65,000 impressions. During the evening the term #priceoflife became a trending topic on Twitter, in Sydney – meaning it was one of the most viewed and mentioned subjects at the time.

 

The activity increased the mentions of @thedirtyhostage dramatically on the day. And sentiment towards the author, @thedirtyhostage and the book, Price of Life, was positive. Does this equate to selling more books? Maybe. But the use of Twitter and other real-time web tools such as Facebook, Blogs and so-on can’t be ignored in today’s general marketing mix.