Twitter Writing Contest 2: Win a MacBook Air for a Clever Haiku

Twitter Writing Contest 2 is now closed. Thanks to everyone who submitted an entry, and winners will be announced Friday, November 21.

Back in May, I launched the first ever @copyblogger Twitter Writing Contest. People seemed to have a lot of fun participating and reading the hundreds of submitted entries, so I’ve been looking forward to doing another one.

If you missed the first one, the Los Angeles Times did a nice write-up of the event. In a nutshell, contestants had to tell a story in exactly 140 characters, which is the maximum allowed for any tweet on Twitter.

This time we’re doing something a bit different.

Write a Killer Haiku for the Win

As you might have gleaned from the headline, this time we’re going to write Twitter haiku. There’s already a healthy group of people who tweet clever little haiku poems on Twitter due to the constrained size, so it seems a natural for Twitter Writing Contest 2.

If your memory is a little rusty on what haiku is, here’s a refresher:

Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry. It consists of 17 syllables broken up into three phrases of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively.

Here are two quick examples found on Twitter Search with the tag #haiku:

Been up way too long / Need about a week’s more sleep / Might not be enough

~ @MFlanders

The furnace is fixed / breath invisible again / how much is the bill?

~ @badboc

Got it? Obviously, the more clever, comedic, or compelling your haiku, the better your chances of winning.

Like this one found on t-shirts:

Haikus are easy / But sometimes they don’t make sense / Refrigerator

Now on to the good stuff.

First Prize? A MacBook Air

We had some really great prizes last time, but we’re kicking it up a notch. Here are the prizes for first, second, third places.

First Prize – A MacBook Air, the world’s thinnest laptop, courtesy of DIY Themes and the Thesis Theme for WordPress.

Second Prize – Free access to Product Launch Formula 2.1+, the highly regarded online training program (tuition $1,997), courtesy of Jeff Walker. (If you purchase PLF when it opens–and likely sells out–today, you will receive a full refund as winner).

Third Prize – Free access to the new-and-improved Teaching Sells online training program (re-launching in January 2009 for $997), courtesy of Teaching Sells.

These are the Rules:

Rules, rules, rules… you can’t avoid them. And to be eligible to win, these are the ones you’ve got to follow:

1. You must have a Twitter account. Open one for free to participate.

2. Please tweet your submission (one per account) in English with the following format:

Phrase one (5 syllables) / phrase two (7 syllables) / phrase three (5 syllables)

3. After you’ve tweeted, you must cut and paste the poem itself into the comments of this post, along with the direct URL to the tweet (to get the tweet URL, you click on the tweet time stamp, i.e. “3:32 PM Nov 12th” or “about 12 hours ago”). Make sure the email address you use for the comment is valid so we can contact you as a winner (email addresses are never used for any other purpose).

4. I know it’s unnecessary with this crowd, but… original submissions only! It’s quite easy to search Twitter or Google to see if your inspiration amounts to plagiarism. Don’t do it please. 🙂

5. Submissions will be accepted in the comments of this post until 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time, Sunday, November 16, 2008.

I’ll be answering questions and giving any necessary updates on Twitter, so make sure to follow @copyblogger. I’m looking forward to seeing what you all come up with!

About the Author: Brian Clark is the founding editor of Copyblogger, and co-founder of DIY Themes and Lateral Action. Get more from Brian on Twitter.