A Twitter story

Lisa Etheridge (lisatickledpink), a second year design student here at Unitec woke up on Thursday morning (4/3/10) a Twitter celebrity! Lisa is a student involved in a project Thom Cochrane and Isaac Flitta (staff from Te Puna Ako and Department of Design) are doing with universities from Chile and Ireland.The students from all three universities in the project are using Twitter as a communication tool. The time difference between the three country makes Twitter a perfect fit.

Thom Cochrane ran a Twitter session with the students here at Unitec involved in the project and Lisa Etheridge was one of them. Lisa's first twit to the Twitterverse was "I hate technology".

At the same time in the USA Leo Laporte and Co were looking for someone new to Twitter with less than 3 followers to promote to their 150,000 strong TV show followers. Leo was doing this to show a celeb it is not difficult to get 15,000 followers on Twitter hence the random select. One person from Leo Laporte's group searched for the exact words Lisa had twitted "I hate Technology" of cause Lisa wasn't the only one who twitted these words but what made her special was that she was from New Zealand and the guy who searched for these words had just had an awesome vacation in New Zealand. This is how Lisa became their choice. It was televised live and people watching were asked to randomly follow lisatickledpink. By Friday morning (5/3/10) Lisa had more than 3000 followers ..... the number is still increasing at a steady rate of 10 followers per minute and now stands at 15,638 (as at 10/3/10 @ 11.28 pm).

All this happened, Lisa had become an overnight Twitter Celebrity and she didn't have a clue. She would have had a shock looking at her inbox. She panicked and locked her Twitter profile and spent sometime looking for answers. She after a few minutes unlocked her account and posted her second twit!

Lisa has so far had an Interview on Kiwi FM (Youtube video attached) and she is tomorrow morning featuring in a 1 minute interview on TV 1 outlining her experience so far with Twitter and the expectations from her 15,000 strong followers.





Lisa receives an iPad from Leo Laporte and one lucky follower will also receive one.


The project Lisa is involved in now has a greater scope and a global audience to learn and collaborate with. Reading some of Lisa's recent posts, she has already started making use of the knowledge and expertise from her community.

Lisa's Blog site: http://lisae294.vox.com/