Virgin Radio have fun with Twitter and Guinness

Link: Fun with Twitter – blog – James Cridland

Former Digital Media Director at Virgin Radio (and as of yesterday Head of Future Media & Technology, Audio & Music at the BBC) James Cridland has written an interesting blog entry about using Twitter to keep in touch with his former colleagues during a rather large Guinness-fuelled weekend in Dublin.

If you’re taking a lot of people out somewhere for a, er, training weekend, then it’s quite fun to be able to be able to continue to communicate with each other when you’re split up and around the city.

 Twitter’s all well and good, but if you’re a group of 80, everyone would need to register to everyone else’s Twitter feed to make a simple application where you can shout out to everyone in your group. This wasn’t going to work. But I quite liked the cost of using Twitter’s free texting facility.

He put together a system using the existing Virgin Radio shortcode, and glued it into Twitter. It worked a treat too – with over half the company registering to keep in touch with each other. James also ended up saving quite a bit of money by using Twitter to send the texts, as he explains:

253 updates in total, which is over 5 updates an hour during the weekend. Which in SMS charges, assuming a cost of 7p outgoing, is £672.98.

Nice one!