After Times Square, the ‘early adopters’ had pretty much all early adopted. Chorus was already hatching plans to test ultra, ultra fast broadband in one New Zealand town, so we suggested having a competition to decide where.

We called it Gigatown.

Towns competed to win the fastest internet in the Southern Hemisphere - the winner being the town who wanted it most, as measured by social media activity. And compete they did. As luck would have it, Gigatown launched at the same time many local councils - who had been developing their own digital strategies - were looking for a catalyst to engage their communities. Boom.

A user generated campaign was an obvious thing to do really. Certainly the most appealing at my end. Not that there’s any shame in laziness. I take great comfort in Bill Gates’ advice: ‘always get a lazy person to do a hard job because they’ll find the easiest way.

Stuff journo Henry Cooke had quite a bit to say about Gigatown, claiming we’d used twitter ‘as a plaything’ and calling it the ‘worst social campaign ever’. To be fair this was long before the muskrat literally used it as a plaything, but even so I was a little confused as to what he thought twitter was actually for. By the end of his tweets Henry managed to un-convince himself, admitting that the worst thing about Gigatown was its success.

New Zealand’s hashtag of the year - and four others in the Top Ten - were all Gigatown related. Nic reminded me the other day that at one point Gigatown traffic took twitter down for three minutes, so we can actually say we broke Twitter long before Elon had the idea.

The game generated earned and social media exposure more than ten times the campaign budget. When it was all done and dusted, Gigatown won Best Community Engagement, Best Social Media campaign, and the Supreme gong at the NZ Marketing Awards.