{"id":2201,"date":"2009-12-12T14:57:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-12T19:57:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-03-27T21:21:35","modified_gmt":"2020-03-28T02:21:35","slug":"second-thoughts-about-my-twitter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/2009\/12\/12\/second-thoughts-about-my-twitter\/","title":{"rendered":"Second Thoughts About My Twitter Contest"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Since November of 2007, I&#8217;ve been running a low-key contest on Twitter.  It was very simple, I ran a couple of Perl scripts to archive any tweets containing @HenryMelton, which for the most part were replies to me about something.  Once a month, I ran a second script that randomly pulled one of the userid&#8217;s from the completed month&#8217;s archive.  I excluded family members, obvious robot-tweeters and previous winners.<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>With the winner id in hand, I tweeted a @reply to them notifying them, telling them where to see the list of my books and asking for a mailing address.  If that notification was ignored, as it was half the time, I repeated with a direct message with the same info.  On rare occasions, and if there was an email address to be found via their profile, I would send an email notification as well.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>This worked well for several months, winners were happy.  Books found new homes.  I put up a courtesy link to their twitter stream on my website.  Then the phishing attacks started on twitter.  Suddenly, some URL&#8217;s were suspicious, especially from people you didn&#8217;t know well.  Someone offering you something for free out of the blue was doubly suspicious.  I fear I may actually lose followers by choosing them as winners.  <\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>So, what should I do now?  I will obviously continue December&#8217;s contest as normal, but beginning in 2010, I think I should do something different.  My goal is to increase the quality and quantity of conversations with people I meet via the internet.  I would also like to expand the possible winner pool to those who read my tweets via the cross-posting to Facebook.  I&#8217;ve had questions from people who only see my tweets there.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>One possibility is to increase the visibility of the contest, so that everyone knows about it.  Being a natural hermit, this isn&#8217;t comfortable. I see people who announce every contest, every post, every cute quote multiple times, sometimes daily.  I don&#8217;t think I could do that.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Another possibility is to increase the rate at which I choose winners.  However, mailing out books costs me money and I couldn&#8217;t afford to do this weekly.  I could change it to an ebook or PDF giveaway and increase the rate.  <\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>To get around the &#8220;Where did this come from?&#8221; syndrome, I could make it an opt-in contest, rather than based on unrelated conversations.  <\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In any case, I will be changing my contest before too long and I could really use some feedback.  Leave me a comment or two.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since November of 2007, I&#8217;ve been running a low-key contest on Twitter. It was very simple, I ran a couple of Perl scripts to archive any tweets containing @HenryMelton, which for the most part were replies to me about something. Once a month, I ran a second script that randomly pulled one of the userid&#8217;s&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/2009\/12\/12\/second-thoughts-about-my-twitter\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Second Thoughts About My Twitter Contest<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[171,24,235,81],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4t90x-zv","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2201"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2202,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201\/revisions\/2202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}