Mix and a-mingle and a jingling tweet. That’s the Jinglebook rock!
Audio book company Findaway World added a little cheer to the ‘sphere and launched “the first holiday audiobook written on Twitter by Twitter users,” says Dean Skinner, chief creative and marketing officer at Findaway World.
“’Let’s find a way to do something really creative and innovative this year for the holiday,’ while at the same time it promotes what we do, which are audio books,” Skinner says about the audio book’s creation.
Participants can contribute to the current 12-chapter audio book by tweeting their storybook line to #Jinglebook. After tweeting, authors can listen to a reading of their latest masterpiece by visiting http://jinglebook.findawayworld.com/ or SoundCloud.
“We chose Twitter because, wouldn’t that be fun?” Skinner asks. “It’s short, it’s so many characters, and the sporadic-ness of tweets, we thought would be funny.”
Being the season of giving, Findaway also ties in a philanthropic element to the campaign. For every tweet, the audiobook company pledges to donate $1 worth of Playaway audiobooks, one of the company’s main brands, to schools affected by Hurricane Sandy–with a maximum giveaway of $10,000. Skinner says the book is currently composed of a little more than 1,000 tweets.
“It was just an idea that we had that’s innovative, that’s unique, that supports what we do as far as our core offerings, as well as how can we give back,” Skinner says.
To promote the campaign, Skinner said Findaway posted the campaign on its Twitter and Facebook pages, as well as created a promotional YouTube video featuring comedian Mike Polk Jr. reading a sample chapter. In a guerrilla marketing effort, Skinner says, Findaway dropped off T-shirts and stickers at local coffee shops. The shirts, which featured taglines such as Mother Jingler, played off of the company’s Naughty to Nice Word Translator, which converts swear words to more holiday-appropriate terms.
“If you type in a curse word, it goes against a whole database of holiday words,” Skinner explains. “So you could say mother ‘blank’ and it would says mother jingler or mother candy. You’ll hear that in the audiobook.”
Skinner says Findaway took an integrated promotional approach to cut down on cost and drive attention.
“We knew that we weren’t going to have hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote this,” Skinner said. “We said, ‘What can we do that we believe is smart and we believe could help build the grassroots effort?’ So all those channels—YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, SoundCloud, and then you add in the guerrilla component they’re all grassroots.”
While Skinner says Jinglebook did acquire some celebrity tweets from 1980s pop stars Debbie Gibson and Taylor Dayne, as well as from best-selling author Maggie Stiefvater,he admits that he expected the participation to be higher.
“We have so many folks retweeting and promoting it, but we thought more folks would participate and help build the story,” Skinner says. “The press and promotions have exceeded expectations. The participation and adding tweets–I thought we’d have more.”
However, Findaway learned a thing or two about social from this holiday experiment. “It’s easier to get attention for something than it is to get participation,” says Jamie Belardo, social media manager and copywriter for Findaway World. “I think It’s just been a little bit of an eye opener as far as how to get people to get involved.”
The campaign will come to an end at midnight tonight.
