On Friday, to celebrate my last day of work, I decided to post on my blog that I knew the winner of MasterChef. ( see http://www.michaelphipps.com/post/143359101/who-wins-2009-masterchef-australia ) I guessed the winner - I had no inside information, might as well have flipped a coin!
I posted a one liner to twitter: “Winner of Masterchef Australia 2009 leaked! Find out who it is here: http://is.gd/1BWOI (SPOILER) #masterchef”
The link is powered by is.gd which lets you track the number of people who click on the link after you posted it just by viewing the url with a dash: http://is.gd/1BWOI- (at original time of writing, this number was 433, but will now be artificially inflated by this story)
I was keeping a close eye on all the stats to see how things were going. In the entire time, the link was only posted 6 times, 4 by me, 2 by other people. My webstats speak similar numbers, so the number of people who were retweeting the link with their own shortened url was insignificant.
While almost no one was prepared to be accused of spoiling the suprise for others, many were prepared to take a peek themselves.
The other thing I was interested in watching was how TEN would react to me “leaking” the result. I had 2 hits from TEN. That’s all.
The interest in my post started gaining again the day of the final, coming into the final hours, and another mention on Twitter was enough to double the number of hits I had already accumulated on the link. taking up to the grand total of 433 (which is where I will stop counting)
I posted one more follow up tweet once the announcement had been made stating that my ‘leak’ was a fake. No one cared. The number didn’t get significantly higher. The show was over, people knew the winner for sure, and tomorrow we’ll be all talking about how pissed off chris looked. (Chris was my favourite btw)
Once the people came to see what they came to see, show was over, no point trying to milk anything out of it after the event.
So in this exercise, which was actually looking at how far I could reach with a few tweets, I learnt the following:
1) People don’t like spoiling the outcome for others (and don’t like it when other people spoil it for them)
2) People secretly want to know the outcome, even if they don’t want someone to spoilt it for them
3) Once the fat lady sings, the shows over. You’ll sell more mementos of the occasion before the show, not afterwards.
4) A few small tartgeted tweets can reach a large audience. Tweeting in a way that others want to Retweet will help you go viral. Obvioulsy people weren’t going to tweet news that would spoilt it for everyone.
I sent 4 tweets in total. When I sent them before the event, people were reasonably reactive. Right before the event, they were most reactive (suprisingly, couldn’t they wait another 2 hours?) The tweet I sent after the event got very little interest at all. The right now generation hav already moved on to talk about Australian Idol.
I think my audience reach was about 1500 (based on the number of followers from the people who posted the link), so to grab ~30% wasn’t bad. I believe people who were watching the #masterchef hashtag would make that number lower, but I have no way of measuring that.
