NaNoWriMo takes over the Social Media 'verse

It's the end of October, meaning that it's almost the start of an annual 30 days of insanity known as NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. Even if you aren't one of the hundreds of thousands of people all over the world who participate in National Novel Writing Month, chances are good that you've heard of it, or that if you haven't yet, you'll see mention of it sometime over the next 34 days. 

NaNoWriMo was begun in 1999, and that first year, a mere 28 people came together to write a novel (loosely defined for the purposes of NaNoWriMo as a work of fiction at least 50,000 words long) in a single month. Two years later, that number was in the thousands, and right now, according to NaNoWriMo's twitter feed, 83,850 people have signed up already to participate in 2009, a number that will continue to grow in leaps and bounds over the next week or so. (And here, a note of geeky pride--I have participated since 2001, and my user number for the official site is in the mere 3 digits.)

For NaNoWriMo participants, October, especially the last couple of weeks, is often almost as taken over by NaNoWriMo as the actual novel writing month itself, November. The official site's forums go crazy with threads on everything from plotting a novel to writing software to the best music to listen to when writing sad scenes. But I remarked to a friend recently that this year I'm spending a lot less time on the NaNoWriMo site than I usually do. After a bit more thought I realized that the reason for that is because I almost don't need to: NaNoWriMo is all over everywhere else I spend online.

On Twitter, the #NaNoWriMo hashtag is already going strong, allowing you to search for realtime results for tweets that include the phrase NaNoWriMo. I expect that during the month of November, that hashtag will be among the top 10 trending topics for the entire month. On Facebook, the NaNoWriMo group has over 13,000 members. Even on Ravelry, a social networking site for knitters, there is an active NaNoWrimo group with people chatting about NaNoWriMo, wordcount, characters, and how it's affecting their holiday knitting time.

In other words, NaNoWriMo has become ubiquitous. Although the official NaNoWriMo website is a valuable and well used resources for participants, NaNoWriMo has expanded beyond its bounds. Some of that expansion into the social media universe is no doubt supported by the Office of Letters and Light, the nonprofit that runs NaNoWriMo. But others, such as the Ravelry group, are entirely participant based. It's a snowball effect--this kind of ubiquity didn't appear overnight, but each year, each November, NaNoWriMo's reach became a little bit larger.

This is the kind of thing we'll be seeing a lot more in the future--rather than having to make people come to your website and participate in yet another community, you may find that people who feel connected to and involved in your programs will bring that program into their own online communities, expanding the reach of your program farther than you would ever be able to yourself.

Posted by Claire Smith on October 28, 2009 at 10:29 am EST

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