Twit Twat

[Max Dirks]

A few weeks ago, Breaker suggested we take to twitter to get a shout out from Jon Stewart on his show. After he made the suggestion, I looked into Twitter and it is an absolute gold mine for hits, registrations and potential new players. I've come up with a few ways promote Althanas by giving celebrities and other popular accounts shoutouts.

1) Book reviews. Althanians read, a lot. If you read a book, why not give it a stab reviewing it by using the Althanas rubric? Think that J.K. Rowling's new flick "The Unexpected Vacancy" deserves a 65? Create the review and we'll point it out to her VIA Twitter. Vince Flynn is back at it? R.A. Salvador? I know you all want to rip into Orsen Scott Carde. Do it. We'll make it happen. This obviously can extend into several mediums.

2) Writing tips. You write a blog entry for me, I'll post the blog entry and tweet about it. I'll make sure we categorize the tweet appropriately to make sure your entry trends (to like 20 people ;) ).

3) Breaker's idea. Those who watch Stewart, Colbert and others can give us tweet ideas to see if we can't get a shoutout. Twitter follows=Althanas visits.

What other ideas do you guys have to use social media? I'm all ears. Also, feel free to start brainstorming (or contributing) to those things I mentioned above. We'll get them posted straight away.

[Breaker]

My original suggestion was to challenge Colbert (and his writing staff by proxy) to "see who can write the best in an Althanas battle". Depending on how it was phrased that might at least get an on-air shout out. Colbert responds to silly challenges fairly frequently, and he seems to have a lot of pride surrounding his status as a Tolkien guru. I think there's potential there, but I don't really use social media myself.

[Mordelain]

Is there any way to link Facebook with Althanas more? Perhaps an automatic daily 'post snippet', or to auto-post announcements and the Chronicle on there?

[Aurelianus Drak'shal]

I thought we already had The Chronicle uploaded to Facebook when it was put up here?

Show's up in my feed everytime.

[Lye]

The Breaker doesn't use social media?! o.O

My world just fell apart. I think the other idea is to do some scouting as well. Find a few other writing groups and talk about our site. I sort of did that on RolePlayerGuild and we got a few bites. A facebook group page might help with someone to post writing snippets and spotlights. Our members with the group liked can re post it on their page to get some face time from their friends as well as advertise the site. I know almost all my high school friends used to RP on spiral notebooks back in the 90's. They might take a bite.

You also have a large untapped crowd of writing workshop forums. Maybe get some people to branch out on those to post some threads for workshop suggestions? That would increase exposure. I remember using some of my threads in my creative writing class. I think I scored an A- or something.

You also have Tumblr where we can post up Judges Choice threads and see if we can hook some people through our writing?

For a silly, and impractical suggestion, we can create a fake singles ad for Mr. Cronen on one of the dating sites.

[Mordelain]

Tumblr JC's gets a thumbs up from me.

[BlackAndBlueEyes]

I swear to god if someone uses the word "branding" in this thread I will single-handedly cause the next great Althanas Crash.

Jokes aside, I am curious as to whether or not there is a precedent for Twitter leading to an activity spike in other PbP forums.

Shouting our heads off at popular television shows and famous authors is nice and all, but in my opinion getting @JohnQPublic153 to click on a book review or two is going to mean nothing if he's not our target in the first place. I think we should focus our attentions not on the general public, attracting hundreds or thousands and hoping that five or six will register a character and stick around; but rather the kind of person who would love to come here in the first place, if only they knew that we existed.

If we are going to go after Twitter users, I believe we would be better served aiming our sights at fans of fantasy role-playing and writing, and not the general public.

Also, tumbling JC threads is a fantastic idea. Paste the first post or two, then provide a link to the thread from there to pull them in.

[Zook Murnig]

Plus, if we start posting JC threads to Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook as part of the reward, it'll add that extra level of prestige. I've spoken with Manda, and she is willing to pass the Althanas tumblr page over to me. Anyone who is on tumblr already should post excerpts of their work and tag it #althanas every so often, or submit their excerpts to the official tumblr page, http://althanas.tumblr.com . Or PM a link to me of a thread of yours you'd like to submit for the Tumblr page. I'll try to tag appropriately to get interested readers, and I know there's a large roleplay community on tumblr.