George Murphy, a Baltimore social media consultant, says trying to work Twitter with a sales pitch is poison because it feels like spam.
"Be personal, share personal stuff on there so that people can relate to you, and they'll actually pay attention to what you're saying," he says. "Nobody pays attention to you if you're self-promoting most of the time."
The whirlwind whale tattoo saga started last week when Tom Rowe, BACVA's Web guru, threw down a spontaneous challenge on Twitter, hoping to beat Chicago and Portland's tourist bureaus to boasting 3,000 followers on the service.
As an afterthought, he tossed in the allure of someone getting a tattoo on live video as an incentive for people to follow BACVA on Twitter. The 31-year-old didn't want another tattoo, but his friend, Ryan Goff, a 24-year-old social marketing specialist at MGH Advertising, gamely offered his own leg.
The two holed up at a Fells Point bar last Monday night, sending messages on Twitter about the tattoo challenge and live-streaming video of their antics. In a matter of hours, they attracted 1,495 new followers for BACVA, hit Twitter's coveted most-discussed threshold, and forced Goff to make good on his promise to have Twitter's "fail whale" tattooed on his body.
The tattooing on Wednesday night, with its own video stream watched by hundreds of people worldwide and a flurry of update "Tweets" from Rowe and Goff, also became one of the hottest topics on Twitter, an achievement on a site with about 6 million followers.
Though the inky whale logo - which features Baltimore's Natty Boh icon in place of the birds - on Goff's calf is as real as the blood that trickled from his leg as he was getting it, less clear are any other results of the young men's exploits.
Baltimore's tourism agency, of course, hopes it means quite a bit, and that each of its 3,000 new fans on Twitter might visit the city and spend money.
Tom Noonan, BACVA's president and CEO, who had no idea what Rowe and Goff were doing on his organization's behalf until after the fact, is thrilled at the buzz - especially that it was free. (Rowe said he paid for Goff's leg art out of his own pocket.)
"I'm glad we had the opportunity to put ourselves out there in front of people around the world," Noonan says. "To rise to the top like that is great marketing."
Noonan acknowledges that the Twittering 20-somethings who might have been most smitten by the tattoo gimmick aren't exactly Baltimore tourism's top customers.
