December 19, 2008
Learnings from #twittersecret
By: David Alston
So it’s been a week and time to reflect on what we learned from unleashing the #twittersecret upon the masses last Friday.
In no particular order:
People like to keep a secret a secret – yes, we were very surprised to see how long the secret stayed a secret. For about 1.5 hours no one spilled the beans and even when it finally came out that person apologized to me for it – which was very admirable.
The photocopy effect – I suppose this only makes sense when you think about how a whispered secret can change with each new generation. Yes, in one direction it became a Rickroll. Another, it became people making up funny stories about what #twittersecret could be (good Friday afternoon fun 
. But most surprising of all, half the secret vanished by the 2nd or 3rd generation. Which leads me to…
It was 920 characters not 255 characters – The DM that was originally sent was actually around 920 characters long and that was the real BIG secret. We purposely wrote it though to clip perfectly at 255 (because that’s all that would appear in the sent messages window on Twitter.) But if you had email notification turned on, which we do, you got the entire 920 character message. It would appear that either people don’t have this feature turned on or that they focused on the 255 embedded message and spread that. Either way, the 920 character limit part of the secret never broke online…until now.
And finally,
The completely unexpected outcomes – Yes, there were a few. Those with delivery to text messages got bombarded with up to 7 texts in a row with the 920 character DM because Twitter chopped it up to deliver it. And there was also lots of debate as to whether anyone really wanted to have messages longer that 140 characters because succinct essence of Twitter was what they truly cherished.
As far as some marketing learnings go what started as only with a couple of tweets spread like wildfire in little over 2 hours to generate over 650 retweets and continued on into the weekend. The keys to the success of the spread was that, while the the ask “I know the #twittersecret – DM me to find out” tweets were generic the message was shared amongst trusted networks AND the information was valuable, relevant and even remarkable to the many who received and retweeted it.
What other lessons can be gleaned by this upon retrospect?
Hey David,
Excellent summary. One additional thing that I observed was the effect of seeing something repeatedly (but not in the sense of an “ad” with multiple impressions, but rather seeing the message repeated from multiple people that you trust). Since the twitter secret message appeared to be a bit playful, many people initially did not bother to ask about it (I would have been one of those), but then once you see 2,3,4 + of your followers talking about it and saying good things about it, you start to think that there must be something to it and then you hit a threshold where you have to check it out.
I think this phenomenon is very much observed in the spread of brand perceptions online.
David Alston,
Thanx for providing us such a good Tricks for twitter, I think it seems very useful for people who are linked with Social networking websites.