Now that the dust has settled, wounds have healed and friendships have been, somewhat, repaired it is a good time to write about the social media training class on the 5th of October; or as it is now dubbed ‘The Twitter War’. As part of the MLitt Publishing Studies course, we had a class in which we set up Twitter accounts in order to network and establish contacts. All of that may sound nice and harmless but a hardback copy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (yes that Kazuo Ishiguro) was announced as a prize for whoever had the best tweet and that was when all hell broke loose.
We were to tweet using the hashtag #stirpub and within minutes Twitter was inundated with our very vocal and vicious fight for the book. As fellow publishing students Laura and Katie put it:
I swear a free book brings out the crazy in all of us 😮😂 #iWILLfightyouforit #stirpub
— Katie Lumsden 🐨 (@_katielumsden) October 5, 2017
Group B was the first group to to have this class and a normally chatty class was rendered silent during this Twitter battle with all that could be heard being the furious tapping at keyboards and the occasional chuckle. Nothing will get a class of book-lovers more motivated than the incentive of a free book. There were some fantastic and hilarious tweets and there were also ones that very much advocated for violence as this tweet shows (a deserving winner I shall say from a completely unbiased viewpoint…)
https://twitter.com/HollieMonaghan4/status/915943720683474944
Our professor Claire had put up a document on Google where we could see everyone’s Twitter handles and follow everyone on the course. This meant that we could all find each other easily and interact, yet it also meant we could attack each other in our bid for a free book! Additionally, a list of Twitter handles of influential and interesting people in publishing was made available to us as a starting point in who to follow in order to gain a wider understanding of the relationship between publishers, authors and social media. Then, many puns, insightful comments, insults and cat pictures later a winner was chosen:
I like big books and I cannot lie 📚📚🤓 #stirpub https://t.co/4IapjrkoKH
— M (@kat_marija) October 5, 2017
So well done to Marija for her excellent tweet (and the cat picture from her other tweet which surely helped towards her win)! As amusing, and brutal, as the Twitter session was it did help us all to actively use our Twitters and interact not just with one another but with our lecturers and other people in publishing. An entire group of people were made social media savvy in just a few hours. Looking at Twitter recently the social media class seems to have worked its magic as so many of the 2017/18 publishing students are still using the platform to interact with authors and publishers and even bookshops. There has even been a book club Twitter made for those on the course at stirpubclub. In essence, the social media class worked well, but perhaps just a bit too well.
Credit goes to:
Hollie Monaghan