Last week was a rollercoaster of progress.

Starting with a lovely message of support from @twitchhiker, the first person to travel half way across the world using social media (specifically Twitter) to arrange his itinerary, and ending with the deadline of the T-Shirt Design Competition, there was also a very encouraging networking event at the Social Media Cafe Manchester.

In between was a fantastic blog post by Carolyn Hughes, the writer and freelance PR consultant behind the brilliant Manchester is Ace blog encouraging people to enter the t-shirt design competition.

Lesson learnt:

People would rather meet than compete.

I had a quick look at the stats for the tweet calling for entries for the T-Shirt Design competition on Twitter and realised that over 350 people had clicked on the link to the design’s page on this blog.
353 in fact.  Here are the stats from bit.ly:

However, not one person entered and the deadline on Friday came and went without event.

So why didn’t anyone enter?

I based the T-shirt design competition on the very well subscribed Woo Tees contest put on by Woo Themes, the WordPress theme community.

Woo Themes is a WordPress theme club that has been going for at least a year and is very well known amongst the WordPress design literati.  It has run a number of very successful competitions in the past and has a fervent and responsive online audience.

I put up a decent prize for the winning prize (I thought).  £50 is not a huge cash prize but a cut of 50% of the profits from the sale of each t-shirt should not to be sniffed at.

I can only conclude that the reason no-one entered was because the 7 Wonders in 7 Days campaign is still in its early stages and is still building credibility.

There’s a small but growing community forming around 7 Wonders in 7 Days, you can see this from the rapport and banter that happens on our Twitter account.  Twitter Counter, the Twitter stats platform is predicting that in a month our Twitter followers will grow from less than 120 to over 600.

So why have I said all this?  Well, as you know, one of the reasons behind my doing the 7 Wonders in 7 Days trip is to assess and develop a focused approach to raising money for charity online using social media.  My day job is running a social media consultancy called Real Fresh TV.

I’m happy to share the ups  and downs of doing this here in the hope that it helps someone else.

The social media metrics I have at my disposal indicate that the community around the project is still growing.   Perhaps what I should have done with the T-Shirt Design competition was to partner with a well known online design community like Woo Themes or may be even Deviant Art to run the competition with their community.

As an awareness building exercise, the competition clearly worked.  However, it’s still early days to run competitions in specific sectors that have a large audience on other parts of the web.  You can’t beat lessons learnt from direct experience.  Next time I’ll know.

As I said, this week was a roller coaster of progress.

I noticed that my announcement of a charity auction and tweetup for 7 Wonders in 7 Days on 25th June at the Social Media Cafe Manchester event on Tuesday was tweeted within seconds of it coming out of my mouth.

@technicalfault #smc_mcr #90909 @7wondersin7days charity tweetup – 7pm, 25/6, Living Room, Deansgate Manchester – be there – DJ needed too (RT?) 7:50 PM Jun 2nd from web

That message was then retweeted at least 2 times on Twitter.  There was also another like it.  Then a DJ for the event was sorted before I even realised it:

@7wondersin7days RT @_Chappers_ @technicalfault I could be up for a bit of DJ action at the tweetup…drop me a DM if u need any details! 11:18 PM Jun 2nd from Tweetie

I had said that I would appreciate help in finding a DJ.

This got me thinking.

Perhaps the way to harness all the incredible support I’m receiving for 7 Wonders in 7 Days is to give people an opportunity to help towards a real physical activity, like an event.

I’ve spent a lot of time this weekend thinking about putting together what I’m calling Team 7 Wonders, a group of people I’m intending to work with to make this campaign a success.  I’m also put together a proper plan for progress going forward.

Team 7 Wonders is a collective of media, PR, music, design and marketing ninjas who have shown by their interest and support on the project so far that they would excel at taking this campaign to the next level.

I will be contacting them all early in the week and announcing the team on the Team 7 Wonders page.

On the t-shirt design competition, all is not lost.

I actually received one entry.  Of sorts.

The extraordinarily helpful David Taylor aka @linkmonkey suggested a brilliant idea at the Social Media Cafe on Tuesday but said he lacked the design skills to enter it properly.

I’m working on his idea and will get t-shirts made sporting the design before the tweetup in a couple of weeks.

So, to conclude, if you’d like to be on Team 7 Wonders, drop me a line.

About the other stuff I shared:

What do you think? Do you agree with my assessment on the reason for the lack of entries on the T-shirt design competition?

Please share in the comments.

Photo credit: Lovely picture of film star Jackie Chan and saxophonist Kenny G from JackieChan.com