The Winner of the 900th Follower of @Chembl Competition!
We ran a twitter competition for the 900th follower of the @chembl twitter feed. Nothing too crazy, just a few sticks of the fabled ChEMBL rock as a prize (I need to get rid of these, since the 'eat by' date is pretty close. If the attendees of our Computational Approached to Drug Discovery Course being held next week, return home with any teeth, it will be a marvel).
I am pretty disciplined in pruning spambots from our twitter followers, and if I had not done this, we probably would have been well over a thousand by now - so getting to 900 'real' people was a pretty big event for us.
Anyway, I listed the competition online, and the twitterverse was then on tenterhooks - in reality, this sort of thing should slow down followers following, (if the followers are aware, or care), since if you see there are, say, 894 followers, and you really want the stick of rock; then wait - and we did see a slow down in accumulation of followers. Here is the announcement of the competition.....
I really did see Noel Gallagher at Heathrow, this was pretty cool - he saw a fat guy in front of him in security, struggling with his belt and shoes - I don't think he tweeted that fact though. I'm drifting, so back on topic, in the twitter stream above is the announcement of our competition.
I regularly monitored the followers as we got closer to 900, and one morning, while I was in Andover NH, I saw someone had won the prize!
It was only Grant Shapps, a proper Minister of State and full Cabinet Member in the current UK Government. Wow! I imagine, Grant must have been watching, waiting for some fool to become follower 899, then pouncing to claim the honour. All I can say is, "congratulations" to Grant, and the prize is in the post - but when you feel the envelope it does feel a little odd - a little bit like a st*ck of d*nam*te; I'm sure they x-ray everything to the Houses of Parliament, so I hope it doesn't go missing in the post room! Also make sure Willetts or Cable see you in The House with our sweetie!
We clearly will have something very special planned for the competition of the 1,000th @chembl follower - Lady Gaga and Barrack Obama, are you ready?