After a week off work, a grey misty Sunday forced me back onto my iPhone and one of my favourite ways of procrastinating – Twitter. First of all, Twitter have finally released an official iPhone App. It took them a while. But good things come to those who wait and so far, so good. It was playing with my new App toy that I stumbled upon #duncansdream and kissed goodbye to the rest of my weekend.
So what is #duncansdream? Well, if you don’t use Twitter (and if you want to effectively use the internet for marketing you really should get yourself on there), # (hashtags) are used to create a trend – kind of like a library catalogue system to track popular things people are talking about. On Friday, Duncan Bannatyne – yes, the REAL Duncan Bannatyne decided to follow all of his 90,000+ followers. Very exciting indeed. His plan was simple, “I would like to #ff all of my followers so all you need do is start following each other then we will all have 90,000 followers. Simples”.
So would this work? Would all of his 90,000+ followers really want to follow each other? Would this just result in a massive amount of Twitter Spam or was it a great way of quickly building a community of like-minded people? There was only one way to find out. I created a new, clean account which was on my to-do list for Monday anyway and I wondered aloud to the Twitterverse “What’s all this #duncansdream all about? Will it introduce me to interesting people or Twitterspam? Oh well, only one way to find out…gulp”. 10 minutes later I had 10 new followers. Not bad going.
But where they Twitterbots or real people? I DMed (sent a private message) to a couple of people and replied to a couple of Tweets. They certainly seemed to be human replies. So I tried again. This time noticing that Peter Jones was trying to get in on the act with #peterspeople “Oooh, didn’t realise this was going to be a competition. Which will be more fruitful – #duncansdream or #peterspeople?” More followers (noticeably more through #duncansdream than #peterspeople it has to be said). Within 4 hours I had 57 new followers. Not bad going for a new account and not a massive amount of work on my side. In fact it’s been proving kind of fun.
So, what on earth is the point or indeed the benefit of #duncansdream? Will it bring anyone on there new leads, new sales or new friends? Well, as with any social networking site, there are people who are just interested in the numbers game. Think of the people on Facebook who would walk past you in Sainsbury’s but will add you as a friend on Facebook to show off about their child/wedding/car. But there do seem to be a number of people who have benefited in some way shape or form from the great weekend social networking experiment from a quick Twitter straw poll.
Professor G. Keith Still (@GKStill) from Bucks New University and expert in Crowd Dynamics commented that he “had a few research leads and a couple of students interested in thesis material. So a successful experiment in networking.” Lesley Kemp (@LesleyKemp) of Kemp Professional Services had already had also found it a potentially prosperous past time, “@MancalaGillian I’ve met some fab people though #duncansdream Gillian and even received an enquiry for my transcription services.”
So trending topics can pay off then.
If you have benefited from #duncansdream or #peterspeople or another trending topic on Twitter I would love to hear from you. You can add me @MancalaGillian
Right, I’m off to see how many new followers I now have.
Gillian has been with Mancala since 2003 and lends her expertise on language & technology as our resident Internet Marketing Copywriter. A bit of a stickler for details she can often be found auditing our clilent's websites for search engine friendly copy (and errant spelling mistakes) and making ridiculously weak tea. 
