http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/bb218/commentsjunkie/newyear/HEADER.gif2009 is only hours away. Time to tweet so love to my followers.

I’m giving away some gifts tomorrow, January 1st 2009 via Twitter.

Like most of our Twitter projects, there are no rules when we started this. About a week ago, someone offered me a piece of artwork to give to my 5000th follower.

I had done the milestone follower bit a few times before. Usually without any warning.. I’d grab number 600 or number 2000 from the email notices Twitter sends, and send out some love via Twitter.

Most of the time, there no “gift”.. just tweet from me, comments on blogs, and a bit of promotion to help them gain some new followers.

It was so much fun, I started doing it all the time.. like “who needs a reason?” <grin>

So when the idea came up for the 5000th follower, my first reaction was that I did not want to create a rush of new followers just for the number. Instead, I decided that I’d use the occasion to give away MORE GIFTS.

This morning I tweeted that I needed some gifts. Response has been huge. There are some fabulous books and “real world” items and lots of digital products and even some services.

I’ve been doing give away cross promotions for new best seller books over at ZeroCostPromotions.com for years. I know this works. We’ve seen business deals for tens of thousands of dollars come from the connections made by partners and had dozens of best seller books in the process. Giving stuff away build reciprocity and great relationships.

Next step will be to sort through them and figure out how to give them away. Most likely, you’ll be seeing tweets on January 1st announcing it. Maybe “9 prizes for 2009″ as the theme.

What can we learn from this experience?

  1. People are willing to give. I didn’t promise to pay, or to make them money. People just like to jump on board then there is a fun promotion
  2. You can’t plan social media from the top down.. It’s not going the way I envisioned. It’s better and the only limit is how much time I can spend arranging the gifts
  3. You can connect and build a relationship quick. Tweeps contributed within seconds and you can be sure that I’m not going to forget them soon (nor will the winners)

Subscribe to this blog, follow me on Twitter and watch my twitter stream and the hash tag #Happy09 for more on the Happy New Year Gift giveaway


@WarrenWhitlock

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