I was recently reminded of this story and thought I’d regale you all with its anecdotal fluffiness.
It’s Tuesday, 25th June 2013. A standard Tuesday afternoon. I should probably have been working on a client’s CSS or somesuch but it seems I was distracted by something. That something being the Twitter. I have been known to tweet occasionally.
This particular Tuesday afternoon, the band The Script were doing a Twitter Q&A using the hashtag #AskTheScript.
Okay, lets do this! Gonna answer a few questions 😉 G #askthescript
— the script (@thescript) June 25, 2013
@BiscuitAhoy stumbled across this and decided to ask some of the questions that had obviously been bugging her for ages. Questions like:
#askthescript How does wool work?
— Lisa (@BiscuitAhoy) June 25, 2013
#askthescript How many of you could get into Rusty Lee?
— Lisa (@BiscuitAhoy) June 25, 2013
Valid questions. I popped up with some of my own and retweeted quite of few of the funnier ones:
Do you prefer a Dyson Airblade or a more traditional hand drier? #askthescript
— Andy Parmo (@andyparmo) June 25, 2013
#askthescript how do I find out if the light goes off in the fridge when I close the door?
— Andy Parmo (@andyparmo) June 25, 2013
#askthescript is it true that the only thing that is actually IMPOSSIBLE to do is to strike a swan vesta match on a block of Rowntree jelly?
— Dominic (@EJ02DOM) June 25, 2013
#askthescript How much Norris would Chuck Norris chuck if Chuck Norris could chuck Norris? HAHA!
No, seriously though, do you like Wotsits?
— Chris (@ChribHibble) June 25, 2013
The #AskTheScript shenanigans led to various other #Ask hashtag hijackings and the glorious #AskDeanGaffney, which we started ourselves, and which became the number 1 trending topic in the UK that afternoon. Gaffney himself was asking questions on facebook about why he was trending on Twitter.
A few months after this, @BiscuitAhoy brought my attention to a document that had been put together by marketing agency Bloom using Whisper, an “earned media planning tool”, to decipher social media trends. It identified that the #AskTheScript hashtag should’ve ran its course, then died away like any other. But it didn’t. And they looked into why. Of course, we already know why. Oops.
The band themselves stopped replying to fans after 75 minutes. We kept asking them silly questions for some time after that, keeping the conversation alive. I am described in this document as the person who “joins everything together and helps this part of the conversation gain momentum”. Such a proud moment.
You can see the entire document at http://www.bloomagency.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Extending-the-lifecycle-of-a-Twitter-QA1.pdf in all its PDF goodness.
