If you follow my Twitter timeline you may know that on each day of Advent I posted a video of a piece of choral music, in a series of blog posts tagged Choral Christmas.

I had an idea that this time of year was a perfect opportunity to share some of the music I enjoy – Christmas music and non-Christmas, sacred and secular. It  also became an opportunity to find some new music. All told, about three days worth of effort went in to the series – watching, researching, writing blog posts, and occasionally recording an Audioboo or two. Each selected video was put in to a blog post, and scheduled to be posted each day. As it went up, an automated tweet was posted to Twitter, which was the main means of promoting the posts.

So was it worth it?  Measured in terms of conventional web analytics, that has to be a big fat no. If I’d spent three solid days throwing eggs at passers-by I would have made greater impact (!), reaching many more people.

All told the posts averaged between five and fifteen views each, predominantly from clicks on the auto Twitter posts. Moving the posting time back an hour from 9am GMT to 10AM GMT had no noticeable effect.  Unsurprisingly, the posts which did slightly better were those where I was a emotive in the subject line – The spine-tingling return of I Fagiolini performed best with 44 clicks over nine days, though I later chose to remove the much overused “spine-tingling” from the headline.

As the post titles were deliberately kept under 140 characters, they are not very well set up for ongoing search engine optimisation, so now the series has concluded I may go back and rewrite more titles with a view to Google rather than Twitter.

So was it a total waste of time then?

No. Not at all. In terms of conventional analytics it wasn’t a roaring success, but it was very satisfying to do, for a number of reasons:

• The tweet advertising the Perotin post Rewind 800 years was favourited on Twitter by a couple of people, an understated gesture that they have enjoyed, or will enjoy later, your writing. Other posts also received favourites.
• The return of I Fagiolini post attracted the attention of the ensemble leader, who wrote a full, informative comment enriching my understanding of a performance which I had loved, even if I had not entirely understood it.
• Several people replied on Twitter to individual posts saying how much they had enjoyed them. Twitter comments lead me to change the final days selections.
• As well as posting up favourites of mine, I discovered new music, and new performers, through clicking on related videos in YouTube.  For example, though I knew the piece well, Voces8′s performance (and Voces8 themselves) of O Clap Your Hands was so enjoyable I played it on a loop for hours. I’ll very likely go and see Voces8 in concert as a result.

Next time, and I think there will be a next time, I will think through the promotion of the posts a bit more to see if the average number of views can be raised a bit. But on balance, I’m happy. As a series of posts it didn’t set the world alight, but it was a learning experience, it appealed to a few people and started a satisfying number of conversations, and it was an opportunity to listen to hours of great music.

For those who did, I’m glad you enjoyed it too!

One of life’s simple pleasures is the unexpected sentence, or the overheard snippet of conversation which, when taken out of context, is inspiring or baffling. It’s partly what makes Someone Once Told Me one of the most consistently entertaining sites on the ‘net.

I’ve always said that some day I would compile a book of unexpected sentences, the sort of things that make you say “well, I never thought that would come out of my mouth”, but I like to start small and pilot first – so before the book comes www.twitter.com/adventitiously

Adventitiously will be a 24 hour stream of consciousness, taken completely out of context. It will launch without warning (even I don’t know when I’ll do it), it will consist completely of passing thoughts of mine, things I overhear, or things I say. Nothing will be explained, it’s for you to imply your own meaning to the moments. An example from today might’ve been:

“If it had to be that big, did it have to be that colour?”

It might be hilarious, it may be profound, most likely it will be a complete waste of time.  We’ll never know unless we try. Whatever happens, I’d like to gather your reactions around the hashtag #adventitiously. So, if you fancy a day out of context some time soon, please follow @adventitiously now.