Twitter: Haiku and London Train Station Kingsplace

Your mission – go to the social network Twitter, write a haiku about English summer (or their approximation there of), tweet it, with the hashtag (label) of #kingsplace.  From Kinsgplace website:

Twitter

Welcome to the Great British Summer Haiku Competition!

Dear Visitor,

Kings Place has teamed up with Network Rail to create the world’s first ‘mobile poetry competition’, focused on neighbouring Kings Cross Station. People travelling into Kings Cross in the mornings are invited to submit Haiku-style poems on the subject of the British Summer from their mobile phones, using Twitter, and gain a chance to see their work displayed on the largest digital advertising board at Kings Cross. As well as appearing on the main digital screen at Kings Cross, some of the Haikus appear below – check back to look out for yours.

To enter, just “tweet” your Haiku using your existing Twitter account with the phrase @kingsplace at the begining and it will be picked up by the Kings Place Twitter account.

The competition will run between Monday 18 May and Friday 22 May, with the entered Haikus being submitted to Yoko Ono and leading UK poet Jackie Kay MBEfor judging. The best haiku poet will be awarded free entrance for themselves and a friend to the Words on Monday events at Kings Place for the rest of the year. In line with the traditional seasonal focus of the Haiku form, the Great British Summer Haiku Competition will encourage writers to reflect on the coming of Summer and what it means to them. What the weather does is another matter!

All the best and Happy Tweeting!

Peter Millican, Director, 
Kings Place

Follow the competition on Facebook 

Crappy press release (SMPR anyone?) but it does the job. Tweet your brilliant yet brief poetry/haiku to @kingsplace. Got it? 

A few mainstream sites have picked it up New Music Express for one. The Guardian of course, as they have a media gallery at the station. And because The Guardian grooves on down with Twitter. Media companies that ‘get’ Twitter, totally get it.

While some of the submissions are following the rules – Mitchelka writes: “Sun breaks horizon \ celestial geometry: \ buzz of cicadas” – other commuters are taking the opportunity to express their frustration at the rail network in verse. Tantalise writes: “Privatise the trains/ The fat cats make money/ Commuters suffer.”

Not a huge buzz in the blogosphere – maybe 60 or 70 blogs, if that. 431 followers on Twitter. They didn’t folow any one back, which means they lost people along the way. 18 updates, which is pretty typical when you pull a TwitStunt for Publicity and don’t have a story/passion to back it up. A week’s lessons in haiku, or chatting with participants would’ve gone a long way to building goodwill. 

When in doubt get a star – like 75 year old Yoko Ono (OMG She’s 75!?!?) – to co-brand your adventure with. I mean, she’s Japanese so must be into Haiku right? I did actually search, and didn’t see any prior relationship between Yoko Ono and haiku so will make an assumption here: any star with a Japanese background would do. The fact that Yoko Ono is on Twitter and has 45k of followers, sealed the deal.  Jackie Kay MBE barely gets a mention in the mainstream press. Or blogs for that matter. 

176 members on Facebook group page. This is one situation where I would’ve created a Fan Page and used the underlying analytics from there, but a small point as they have less than 200 members. I think they tried to seed the competition in haiku communities and blogs (i saw mention on a few) but missed their target market by a country mile. 

Incredibly frustrating is the lack of multimedia. Sorry that’s a 90’s term. I mean, embeddable widgets. Not Twitter feed widgets, just a picture here and there, or a video on YouTube. I nearly ditched this post a few times because I didn’t want to put up a generic picture of the station and statues around the station like the mainstream papers did. Eventually I found (and swiped) this one from This Is London Evening Standard:

 

So lessons from this:

• as a Twitter project it worked fine. As an external one, not so well. 
• seed information properly, into the right communities, for grassroots buzz
• Twitter is a tool, not an end in itself
• partner with interesting groups, maybe teach haiku during the week, give people a reason to follow longterm
• have a long term engagement plan once the week is over
• have photos, videos, wordle’s, mashups ready for bloggers to flesh out their posts with.
• pipe in (RSS) the feed to a site aggregator so we don’t have to link to search.twitter.com which is breaks 3x a day.
• Which one’s would YOU add? 

The main lesson is that because social network information works on ripples, the after-ripple will be larger than the buzz built during one week. Because by the time we’ve heard about it, it’s over. Dunno who won. 

 

There is no further engagement offered on the Kingsplace site as far as I can see. Which means we’ll go back to informing each other of delays, traffic jams and road warnings, using Twitter. 

I wonder what @PrinceCharles thought of it all? Tweet: 

met the Pope today. What a great guy. Not interested in twitter though

*winks* too funny.