The premise was very straight forward – tweet about a book from their website that you would like to read. The 10th person to tweet a book wins the book tweeted. Free book, free shipping. Easy, right?

There are several things I like about the way Chelsea Green ran this contest including:

1. You have to follow them on Twitter to be eligible
2. They have built “Tweet this book” links into each product page that includes a link to the book, as well as hashtags.
3. They primed the contest with a countdown which was re-tweeted several times to spread the word.

So, how did they do on the first run? Some quick stats:

• Total contest time was approximately 4 minutes
• Total contestants was 27
• Total tweets (entries) was 45

At first glance these look like really small numbers, but consider how many others saw these tweets.  According to my quick study via search.twitter.com it appears that these 45 tweets reached 14,216 Twitter users. And each of those 14,000+ users was sent a book title, hashtags, and a direct link to the book’s product page. And, those 14,000+ followers does not include any users who may be consuming searches for the variety of hastags or terms that were part of those tweets.

As a bonus, it appears the Huffington Post re-tweeted at least one funny entry from @daveburdick (over 5000 followers of the 14,000+ total.)

So if you ask me, reaching 14,000 people in the span of less than 5 minutes is pretty good. Of course, we don’t yet know how many of those, if any, clicked through to the publisher’s website, nor how many purchased books.

But, Chelsea only spent some time and the cost of one book plus shipping to try this experiment, which I think is important to do. We need to experiment a little more.  All in all I think it is a very clever use of Twitter to perhaps gain some awareness of the publisher and their books.

What do you think? Productive use of Twitter, or social media folly? What other examples have you seen?

Book trailers hit the scene earlier this year as a creative way for publishers to promote and market their new titles.  Many have been straight forward, and others have been rather dramatic – more like a movie trailer than a book and that’s the point after all. But I really like what Capstone have done with this tongue in cheek approach to the viral.  The style of the video is true to the Capstone brand, and creates the desired buzz while having a lot of fun with the subject.  It also engages the viewer, and converts them from a passive consumer of media into an active participant.

As we publishers figure out how media like video fit into more traditional approaches to marketing, it is good to see Wiley colleagues like the Capstone team breaking out of the old media mold.

If you want to play along, watch the video below, and visit http://dearcelebrity.co.uk for your chance to win an iPod Touch (subject, of course to contest rules and deadlines.)