Q and also A - Twitter Trixx 2011 post mortem
Here's the Comics Face that appears in the latest Trouble magazine and which I posted online everywhere except here on Monday (Check out the Comics Face facebook page to get these as they're posted).
For those outside of Australia, Q and A is a political television show where political-icians come on and talk alongside olden time TV people that you forgot existed. I don't watch the thing but I do like the idea that you can just tweet questions to them right there and some of them appear on screen.
When it airs, my twitter feed gets filled with talk and jokes with the #qanda tag so last week, knowing I had this comic coming up, I thought i'd try and just sneak it into the whole thing. The only goal was to get non-comic people to read the strip in a sneaky promotey way. Like the Indian Jones swapping political discourse treasure and replacing it with jokes that weigh the exact same amount (I think this was in The Indian Jones Raids That Ark).
First I checked who the guests were going to be. I didn't want to be pimping a funny in the midst of any sads. That is when I noticed that the main page for the show automatically shows tweets that have the #qanda hashtag. (Try it now http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/ )
This was fun to play with but it only shows the most recent three and once the show started there were a bunch of tweets every minute so I stopped checking the main page. I did try some tricks like making http://tinyurl.com/QandA-censorship-shock link to it but what worked the best was just making dumb jokes and putting a link and the tag on the end and getting that retweeted.
Strangers did retweet the jokes but I have no idea if they checked out the comic or even knew there was one in there.
The results?
I got ten times as many visitors as usual just by goofing around. Also, I wasn't even watching the show. I was just figuring out what was happening through tweeted complaints and other jokes.
I would never do it again in this exact way but I think it would be a perfect goof for such as Eurovision or an awards show where everyone is just joking and sharing jokes already.