Gadget Show Social Media Test

I love the Gadget Show with its reviews of the latest gadgets and gizmos. Yesterday’s show treated us to a bit of social media experimentation in which Facebook was pitted against Twitter in an attempt to organise a ‘dance-off’ at Somerset House in London.

The rules of the experiment were rather limiting, in that they had less than a week to organise and publicise the event and they were only allowed to use one social media site.

Gail Porter, started by using Facebook to contact her seven hundred odd friends about the event and further publicised the event by adding an event page sprinkled with photographs.

Jason Bradbury, used Twitter and sent messages to his many followers. He also used to great effect the hashtag #GadgetShowMob to create a key phrase to find and organise all Tweets relating to the event. In fact at one point it became one  the most highly searched term on Twitter.

Given the amount of media hype that these presenters were able to generate the results were rather disappointing with Jason managing to attract 208 people to the event and Gail only 23. What does this say about the ability of social media to create interest in events?

Of course there are many caveats in this experiment. The time was extremely limited; most  people lead very busy lives and need more notice  in order to commit to attending a venue. Perhaps the event just wasn’t that interesting to the gadget show fans. An event to drink free beer or eat food may have offered more incentive but might have blown the budget.

Whatever conclusions can be drawn from this impromptu experiment, it is good to see the show focusing some time on this type of SEO related topics as well as gadget hardware.