The Black Mountains of Social Media....

Well, in June I discovered Twitter...and rediscovered The Black Mountains along with a few muscles I forgot that I had!! I didn't really 'get' Twitter and I'm not really sure that I do now but I did realise that fundraising in this economic climate is not as easy as I thought it would be. Not nearly as easy.

One Monday night I went to bed early as the alarm was set for 04:15 the next morning to get the 05:09 train to London for a breakfast meeting. By midnight the idea was forming and it was stopping me from going to sleep. By 01:00 I had to give in to it and go back downstairs and get back on to the computer. I had lain in bed for over 3 hours thinking and developing this crazy idea that was going to solve all my problems overnight and had to at least make a decent note of it!!

By 14:15 I was back in bed for 2 hours of fitful sleep waiting for the alarm to do its bit...which it duly did as soon as I fell asleep I swear!!

My idea was simple, I would embrace the big online Twitter family with a hashtag with a snappy title like #asktheuniverse and put a tweet out to lots and lots of famous people - everyone who read it would donate a quid and I'd be home and hosed by Thursday night - with at least £1m donated by the kind folk of the world wide web.

I tried my donation page and, yes I could donate just a pound (which I did...a couple of times to make sure!!). I wrote the Tweet on the train (the one that had been going around my head all night) and it didn't seem nearly as good in the cold light of day.....

I ran the idea by a couple of people and our PR director Neville Thurlbeck and I came up with a slightly more conventional approach. Neville would do a piece about the trek on HIS blog that would go out to 2,353 on Twitter and this would surely be ReTweeted to millions.

And so it came to pass. It was retweeted to a few famous people and a few from Fleet Street with very healthy followings.

I got one donation.

Having said that, we put a link on it allowing text donations and there is no way of knowing how much that has amassed until we get an email from Just Giving at the end of the month with the latest tally.

I just hope it brings in more than a quid otherwise it's back to the drawing board....again!!

Please feel free to donate a pound or any other amount to:

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/BruceMartin66

You can also text 70070 type in 'ptsd22' and then between £1 and £10

You can also read Neville's blog at:

http://www.nevillethurlbeck.com/2012/05/talking2minds-bruce-launches-our-summer.html

You can follow me on Twitter at  @brucemartin66

Thank you for reading!!