Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Origins of realFASS

Today we sit down with the head tweeter of @realFASS, who only wishes to be known as C, for an exclusive interview.

Good day C! Before we start, we have an odd question to ask you. What makes you think you are popular enough for people to want to read an interview with you?
Firstly, I do not think I am popular at all. We only have 127 followers (at the time of interview), that is far from being popular/famous. Next, some people have actually asked for an interview to know more about realFASS, so I'm doing this in response to that. Lastly, I do have some things that I want to say, so this would be a good medium to do so.

Ok great! Well, tell us about yourself!
I am from NUS, that's for sure. I am from FASS of course. I love wordplay such as puns and the such, hence my creating the fake Twitter account.

About that - What made you create @realFASS?
I was having a conversation with a friend about the recent surge in fake Twitter accounts, with numerous ones related to NUS. She said that some weren't very funny and I was thinking in my head 'Hmm, I think I could do a pretty good job if I made one myself'.
As I said, I love wordplay, I love tweeting about random things, and I could totally picture myself helming a fake Twitter account, consistently producing lame/corny/funny/satirical tweets.

And since @fakeFASS was taken, @realFASS came to be. :)

You often tweet in the plural first person sense, such as 'We' are doing something, instead of  'I'. Is it really a team behind @realFASS?
Of course. We are actually a team of highly-trained monkeys who can operate computers and think of funny things to tweet.

Ok no, I am the lead Tweeter, and I have people who contribute from time to time. Hence I use 'we', as it is more representative of what I am representing anyway. #fassspirit
We have a dedicated blogger though, I hope you like what he has been doing!

You mentioned something about 'what you are trying to do here'. So what exactly are you trying to do with realFASS? What is your aim?
I started off with two main goals in mind:
1) To provide a source of entertainment for all our followers, through funny tweets, random bizarre news, (fake) facts, satire about NUS/FASS, etc

2) To keep FASS/NUS students up to date on latest key official/unofficial events, be it school or non-school related.


The first is obvious - of course I will want realFASS to be as funny as possible, to bring a smile to the faces of our readers/followers (pardon my subconscious switching between I/We ). It makes us happy to make you happy. :)

The next is because of our realization that alot of people are not very well-informed in terms of current events in the school and such. We have people who didn't know when bidding was, didn't know when results were, etc. We want to reach out to these people and give them a convenient source of information through a medium that they are comfortable with - Twitter.

One thing you should have also noticed is that we do follow our followers back. The reason is because we want to be connected to you, and interact with you as much as possible. Remember, #FASScares. If you are a follower of ours and we have not followed you, just drop us a mention and we will do so!

Of course, this blog started because I realize that Twitter was way too short to express some things - sometimes 140 characters just aren't enough.

How will you know when you have attained your goals?
The easiest, most quantifiable way, is of course by our number of followers.
I know we say this alot, but by following us, you ARE directly contributing to more tweets by us because we will be inspired and motivated to tweet more with a rising number of Followers. Also, people tend to follow 'famous' Twitter accounts (gauged by a large number of followers) so it is like a chain effect.

With a large(r) number of followers, we know that what we tweet IS indeed useful and entertaining, and we will thus continue to do as we've been doing. So if you still have friends who don't follow us, do just randomly, casually talk to them about us and ask them to follow us, we really appreciate it. It's not hard. Just click here, and click Follow. Voila.

Another way is by frequency/number of retweets that we get. Retweets are of course the clearest indication that that particular tweet is good/funny/informative/in the right place when your mouse functioned and click retweet. We love it when we are retweeted, as it is also a form of publicity for us.

Anything else you want to say?
Actually, yes quite a bit. We would like to thank certain people who have been with us from the start (in no particular order)- @hahazZ, @auturmis, @fakeMOE, @therealfakeNTU, @cchockolate, @nocommanospace, @gssq, @ladyxtel ... just to name a few.

These people, by random chance or fate, were the first few followers of ours (I think) and have been consistently retweeting our tweets.Without their retweets, we wouldn't have as many followers as we do now. They are also people that we are in constant communication with via mentions (@) so I can remember them quite easily offhand - to those that have been following us a while and also retweet and I left you out - I'M SORRY! Don't un-follow us now okay! @ us more! Then we will remember you :)
Also, some of them we remember because of certain things, like @hahazZ has a distinct sunflower DP, and fellow institution tweeters like @fakeMOE and @therealfakeNTU, etc.

Twitter has been an exciting adventure for me, and it's amusing to see @realFASS soar past my personal account in followers. I hope to reach out to the next generation of freshies this year, but for now, we hope that all FASS Tweeters will follow us! I know for a fact there are many people who do not follow us, for whatever reason it is (e.g. we are lame, we suck, we are not funny, our logo is fugly, they are loners, etc), and we hope we can turn around this reason and get them to support us!

Alright, that's all I have. Keep tweeting, and don't do drugs!

No comments:

Post a Comment