Please RT to win a FREE luxury vacation!

First off… I’d like to apologise. Please forgive the title for it’s completely misleading.  There is no free luxury vacation here – this is in fact nothing more than a Twitter experiment.  Once published, this blog post will automatically go out on Twitter with the subject line “Please RT to win a FREE luxury vacation!” and I’m curious to see how much people re-tweet material on Twitter without actually reading it. I have a strong suspicion that this goes on quite a lot and this experiment will hopefully confirm or deny that. Of course, the subject line is deliberately provocative and aims to entice retweets.  According to Dan Zarrella who is something of an expert when it comes to retweeting, some of the most re-tweeted words include ‘please’, ‘retweet’ (or ‘RT’ – I used the shorter version with Twitter’s character limitations in mind) and ‘free’. Watch the Tweetmeme figure in the bottom right hand corner of the post. If I’m completely wrong with my suspicions, then the number of re-tweets will remain at “1”.  If instead that figure starts to rise, then it would seem to suggest that a number of Twitter users are ‘guilty as charged’ – unless of course, people are just re-tweeting the post merely because they are interested in the experiment (if that were the case, I’d expect some kind of comment to be added, rather than just an unedited re-tweet!). I apologise once again for the somewhat misleading nature of the subject line (and it isn’t even my first offence!) but at the same time would urge people not to re-tweet something if they haven’t read it in full first. EDIT: Tweetmeme is seeming to be slow to update (it’s still showing zero at the time of writing) and I’ve often suspected does not count all re-tweets.  In the first few minutes of the post going live on Twitter, this is what happened. I’ve edited Twitter usernames/faces as I’m not looking to humiliate anyone, rather it is here just to highlight the problem.  The snag is, those that need to see the message that you should read what you re-tweet, clearly aren’t reading this!