It started as a discussion about how we could get through the holiday period without having to update the Business 21C website daily. It ended up creating a mini-me that became a worldwide word game, with the help of some of the internet’s top celebrities.

On December 17, 2009, inspired by an article in the upcoming Business21C magazine by UTS Business academic Suresh Sood on social media marketing www.business21c.com.au published an interactive feature Describe 2009 in Just Six Words. We urged visitors:

When Ernest Hemingway rose to the challenge and wrote a story in six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” he set in motion a simple, elegant and surprisingly compelling parlour game. Can you tell your story of 2009 in just six words? Professionally, personally, globally, locally or poetically – how will you remember this year?

The aim was to stimulate a conversation with the wider community and Business21C by using the popular microblogging and social networking website Twitter. Our intention was to literally feed information back and forth between the two websites.

Technically the feature appeared simple, but it contained some sophisticated programming. Visitors to www.business21c.com.au were invited to enter their six word story, which displayed instantly in a revolving Flash image. At the same time, the mini-story was posted live on Twitter, through the Business21C Twitter account, along with the ‘hashtag’ #2009in6words, which allowed Twitter to collect the posts into one search. At the same time, Twitter users (twitterers) could submitted their ‘stories’ via their Twitter account, and, by including the hashtag, the posts would appear automatically on our website.

To get things started we created posts from within the Business21C team and colleagues at the UTS:

“Worst depression since 30s, never happened.”
“Work life balance skewed towards life”
“Flew to London twice. Thanks wife!”
“Wall Street sneezed, achoo, swine flu.”
“Michael Jackson made comeback in afterlife.”
“Petrol up, confidence down, climate changeable.”
“Finished uni, got job, went brunette.”
“Too much work, better than not.”
“I had a crisis, big crisis.”
“Moved funds offshore, and they sank.”

We then e-mailed friends and colleagues and invited them to Twitter about their year.

* Narelle Hooper, Editor, AFR Boss magazine – “Scarifying, wrenching, rising, relieving, clarifying, resolving.”
* Carina B., Ernst & Young – “Economists prove themselves, yet again, ridiculous.”
* Susan Anderson, UTS – “New premier, new opposition, nothing changes.
* Rebel Penfold-Russell OAM – “Year gone, guilty won, next game?”
* Morgan Drew – Former CEO Abuzz – “Tumultuous start with a fairytale ending”
* Roy Green, Dean, UTS Business – “World changes. Can we shape it?”

Spreading the word

Social networking as a marketing tool is still in its infancy. Like Wikipedia, Google, YouTube and Facebook, Twitter has an organic quality that gives it an ‘authentic’ sheen: the holy grail of viral marketing, particularly for 18-25 year olds.  The bite-size nature of its format (you can only use 140 characters) means that brevity is the soul of Twitter, and gives rise to a certain jocular appeal. At its most effective, Twitter also offers users a window into the lives of famous people.  When used well, (Barack Obama, Ashton Kucher, Stephen Fry) we feel connected to them. When used ill (Hugh Jackman tweeting about the Opera Centre instead of the Opera House) we feel cheated and spurned.

Although Twitter is a global phenomenon, the power positions are dominated by the Yanks, with the #1 most popular Twitterer being Ashton Kucher (Aplusk) with 4,000,000+ followers. Barack Obama is #4, behind Britney Spears and Ellen DeGeneres with Oprah Winfrey in 5th place. These people are able to directly reach a large audience with a single, short personal message. When their messages are ‘retweeted’ the growth becomes exponential – as experienced by Scottish singer Susan Boyle when Ashton Kucher, and his wife Demi Moore tweeted about her performance on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’.

UK arts polymath Stephen Fry’s career has been rejuvenated by Twitter. His intelligent and pithy humour has made him among the most popular of the British Twitterers, with over 1 million followers.

Australian Twitters are a lot further down the ranks, with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd having the most followers (228,000). High profile political and corporate users are different to the more mainstream Twitterers, in that they are disseminating information (like headlines) rather than sharing it personally.  With the exceptions of radio personalities Kyle and Jackie O, and television star Rove McManus, the most popular Australian users may not be familiar to those who aren’t online: Alister Cameron (alicam), Mark at Suburb View, Darren Rowse (problogger), Ben Teo (upicks), Nikhil Parekh, Natalie Tran and Tyrone Shum are the top ten users.

Pushing the profile

In order to promote our little game, we direct messaged as many prominent Australian Twitterers as we could and asked; “Can you tell the story of your year in only 6 words?”

Mark Colvin is an ABC journalist and a highly respected personality on Twitter (colvinius). His coverage of the Iranian revolution on Twitter, undertaken from a hospital bed, has become a famous case study of how new media such as Twitter have changed the nature of news reporting. He has some 3,000+ followers on Twitter, and when he wrote, “Watched the leaders rise and fall,” the flow of six word stories from his followers increased with collegiate good humour:

“broke the rules. didn’t get caught.”
“Oh there’s the sun! You beauty.”
“I WANT TO FORGET THIS YEAR”
“Looking for ice, glass, whiskey, love.”
“fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire”
“Nearly lost house. Saved by community.”

Using www.wordle.net, we collected together our tweets and created this picture of our the words that were coming through, giving us an idea of the images and issues that were top of mind for our users in 2009. Usernames from twitter and the variety of interest means that few words became prominent. Copenhagen, Depression, job, bushfires, Rudd all got a look in… and Business21C was prominent because many of the tweets were coming from our website.

The game really changed when Generation Y got involved, influenced by Power user Natalie Tran. Tran is Australia’s most viewed YouTube celebrity with nearly 200 million downloads and an average of 1.5million views per film. On Twitter she has some 60,000+ followers, most of whom are aged between 12-25. “She responded to the question: “Can you describe 2009 in six words” quite literally: “iran, copenhagen, obama, mj, twitter, avatar”. Her followers seized on this, and responded enthusiastically, many of them ‘re-tweeting’ her entry. Within hours we had thousands of entries giving six unconnected words that summed up 2009 for the youth of Australia.

Obama, Michael Jackson, Iran, Twitter, Avatar and H1N1 clearly stand out as signature events of the year – although it might be safe to assume that Avatar appears because it was released at cinemas that day, rather than because it had significance for the year as a whole. The GFC is notably absent.

Late on Friday evening, we managed to attract what we thought would be our most significant entry: Stephen Fry, Twitter’s 800 pound gorilla, with some 1.2 million followers. Fry stuck his oar in with:  “The floccinaucinihilipilification of Twitter is discredited.”

Pardon?

“Floccinaucinihilipilification” – the longest ‘real word’ in the Oxford English dictionary –  is defined as “the categorisation of something as worthless trivia”. 2009, therefore, was the year that Twitter was given credibility, according to Stephen Fry.  Once we’d consulted our dictionaries, we all agreed it was very (t)witty.

With a Fry contribution and some 1.2 million people watching, we expected #2009in6words to go off like a frog in a sock. But it didn’t. The hours after floccinaucinihilipilification was added to Twitter’s vocabulary were something of a damp squib. It did attract numerous retweets and dozens of new users to the game, but nothing like the number Tran’s six words had contributed.

Over the next few days we searched for reasons why the game had stumbled. It was Friday night – the first day of Hanukah, in the week before Christmas. The climate change conference in Copenhagen was drawing to a close. The subjects which were ‘trending’ at the time (those which were attracting the most comment on Twitter), were Christmas, Follow Friday (US), Copenhagen and #p4a (a charitable YouTube event being hosted by the most popular YouTube celebrities.) ‘Christmas’ was averaging 100 tweets a minute.  We subsequently noticed that when America is ‘awake’ and all atwitter, trending subjects can clock a remarkable 1000 messages per minute.

An equally plausible explanation was that Twitter went down when we would have expected Stephen Fry’s tweet to attract the most interest. In fact this Twitter outage attracted a lot of press in the days following – it turned out the “Iranian Cyber Army” had successfully hacked Twitter for about an hour, at the time when Stephen Fry entered the six word game. Either way, in another 24 hours, the game had slowed to a trickle of entries that lasted into the new year, creating a venue for some beautiful observations about the year that was:

“Life gave me scraps. Made quilt.”

Lessons learned:
* The way things spread on the internet is simply not predictable.
* Timing is crucial.
* Power users have undoubted influence, but the underlying “meme” needs to have broad appeal amongst their followers.
* To maintain a ‘fan base’ on the internet requires regular attention and personal integrity. Experienced users will not be chivvied to play, unless the game itself appeals to them.
* Natalie Tran, Mark Colvin and Stephen Fry are good sports.
* Tweets only last 7 days online.

Things we suspected but couldn’t prove:
* If you get 100 people to perform two tweets a minute for an hour using a #hashtag. You might trend for an hour.
* The Iranian Cyber Army took our ball and went home with it.