Last week, I put out a tweet on the poultrykeeper twitter feed about a little bet I had with the boss… I was thinking I was going to have to pay out a whopping £10 to him because when I have tweeted in the past, I haven’t had many RTs but nothing like what was about to happen….
I went away for the bank holiday weekend and when checking my twitter today, found a few more than 10 re-tweets…. In fact, there are so many I couldn’t count them.. I was completely gob-smacked. There were a few people who had replied to me and said this was a scam and I can see how this looks and I’m sure it has been done in the past to get tweets, others on the other hand made some fun comments and joined in.
Looking at Topsy, the tweet had been re-tweeted around 21’000 times… and made it into the Twitter Top 100 over the weekend.
So, technically 21’000 x 50p is £10’500
So what did my boss say when I asked him to settle our bet? Yes, you’ve guessed it. He Chickened Out… (sorry, such a terrible pun I know and thanks @jonhickman for this one ) and since my lunch hour is almost over, I better get back to work.
…After tweeting this blog post of course 
.
#1 by Hayes on August 30, 2011 - 12:46 pm
Your boss was male on Friday (HE says twitter’s a waste of time…).
Today (Tuesday) it seems she’s female (SHE chickened out…)
Maybe he/she won’t be paying you because he/she needs to keep all his/her cash for his/her operation?
#2 by Bronwyn on August 30, 2011 - 11:41 pm
I had to check up and see what the total was. Think you may have proved your point! Very entertaining!
#3 by Darragh Groeger on August 31, 2011 - 8:08 am
Absolutely fantastic story. If your boss is considering taking social media seriously for a change, Vocus UK has social media monitoring software worth considering, as well as free application you can use to build your own strategy http://www.vocus.com/social-media-strategy/
Again though, well played
#4 by Tim Daniels on August 31, 2011 - 9:36 am
Sorry, got a He / She typo in the original. I have changed it. This was put together in a bit of a hurry during my lunch hour as there were so many people asking me questions.
#5 by Tim Daniels on August 31, 2011 - 9:40 am
I think it’s 22’000 now.
I am hoping it’s in the process of dying now as there are many people fed up of seeing that tweet. I hope the blog post answers peoples questions. It’s looking like a sort of chain letter that strangely enough I never believe in forwarding on and yet here I am at the start of it :-0
#6 by Alex on August 31, 2011 - 5:40 pm
You should at least get £10 out of him!
#7 by Diego on August 31, 2011 - 6:58 pm
This is exactly the same story that happened on Linkedin (U.S.) last week. I first thought it was a brilliant idea from a guy using a social media tool, but know I believe is a marketing stunt from a social media company. You be the judge: http://lnkd.in/WaY3mX
#8 by Tim Daniels on August 31, 2011 - 7:17 pm
You’re right, it looks very similar. I hadn’t seen this (but have liked it of course!).
If I could afford a social marketing company for my (hobby) website… I would… but trust me… I cant
That is unless the boss pays up!
#9 by Joost Schuur on August 31, 2011 - 7:44 pm
Tim: PoultryKeeper doesn’t look like a company that would have a ‘boss’, so if you’re being truthful about the story, you must have another full time job.
Why would your boss pay you money to promote something that is another web site?
I’m really not buying any of this, especially since it comes just days after someone did the same thing on Google+. I suppose you could conveniently answer that your boss never expected to pay out any real amount of money.
At best, you resorted to a chain mail-like abuse of social media. At worst, you lied to the public for the short term gain of a few more followers and eyeballs. Either way, it hurts your reputation.
#10 by Dave (@TweetSmarter) on August 31, 2011 - 7:47 pm
He’s lying.
See bit.ly/olSJY3 … dozens of these identical tweets went out from many accounts. They all just copied each other. This guy was not the first, he was just the most successful. So now he’s following up a lie with another lie, to make it look good, and to keep people from feeling dumb.
#11 by Tim Daniels on August 31, 2011 - 9:19 pm
Interesting blog post. I hadn’t seen that one. Note though: It was created after my tweet went out. The other tweets as you will see from the timeline visible in the screenshot show the others ‘jumped on the bandwagon’ as it suggests.
I’d love you to show me one though that came before my tweet…! I spent a good few minutes editing my words so that there were enough characters to fit in @poultrykeeper when people re-tweeted and there cannot be any before my tweet, just copies afterwards.
I certainly don’t spam people and had no idea this would get so much attention. That’s why I didn’t put more fuel on the fire or retweet any people when I got back and saw what was happening, I wrote this blog post as there were literally thousands of people asking how many RT’s I’d got up to and how much the boss owed me…
You might also like to look at our (ehhhem) hobby website and see the sort of traffic we hope to get – we are rather specialised poultry fanciers in the UK. We’re not commercial – affiliate adverts pay for articles, show photos and if I’m lucky a trip to some of the poultry shows. This isn’t a commercial business and this was certainly not some sort of well conceived marketing social media thing, just an innocent bit of fun with my boss..
I believe it will be copied though and looking at the Linked In version above, I’m sure I wasn’t the first to do this but I’m sure others will follow on a similar theme.
The boss, for the record isn’t anything to do with the poultrykeeper website by the way.
#12 by Tim Daniels on August 31, 2011 - 9:48 pm
Hi Joost,
No, poultrykeeper is a hobby site run by a few enthusiasts. My boss is nothing to do with the website.
The point was, we were discussing Twitter and the “Company Twitter Account” (note I have never mentioned this anywhere as I keep work separate and that would be promoting it off the back of this) has less than 30 followers and still has. He said it was a waste of time and it was only competitors that were following them. I disagreed and said it could be better and I bet I could get 10 RTs if I tried from my twitter account.
I wasn’t trying to promote any website, link or anything else and certianly didn’t want to create any kind of spam – It was some fun in the office and I thought I’d try to prove him wrong… The ‘chain mail-like abuse’ seems a fair comment considering what has happened and I didn’t like the way it brought so many RTs but I had no idea of this happening. I thought it was going to be tough to get 10 RTs. How this happened, (from reading up on the web tonight) I’m guessing because it appealed to people and had a few big guns with thousands of followers re-tweeting. Obviously it snowballed.
One things for sure, I won’t be having any more bets to do with Twitter.
I hope you can see from our site we are genuine / non commercial and this was an innocent bit of fun that has grown to epic proportions. There was no self promotion intended and I’m sure many of the followers that we gained will soon leave when we get back to promoting keeping chickens
#13 by Josephine on September 1, 2011 - 10:59 pm
Oh bore off all you haterzzzz, it’s just a bit of fun isn’t it, sticking it to the boss? And there was no request for followers, was there?
Retweeting is quick and painless, and guess what – NO ONE DIED.