Veronica Pullen and Bill Boswell married old-fashioned romance with social networking at their Crawley wedding
Bill Boswell, 39, and Veronica Pullen, 40, tied the knot on 8 April in Crawley. It was a wedding with a difference: social media manager Veronica wanted to involve friends and family who couldn’t attend and hit upon using micro-blogging site Twitter. The resulting messages provided a blow-by-blow account of the day.
“My husband Bill, a commercial underwriter for an insurance company, started to use Twitter about six months ago so he’s got friends on there too,” says Veronica. “Between us we have about 2,000 friends.” Veronica uses Twitter for most of the working day, either on her own behalf or for clients, and was inspired by attending conferences with a live tweet account of the day.
“We had a package deal at the Crowne Plaza which meant that we could only have 50 people in the room. Twitter was a way of having lots of people there, so that the people we talk to every day could be there as well. I spoke to the hotel about hiring a big screen and we set up an account for the wedding, @Wedding0804. Originally it was just going to be for people who couldn’t attend, like in the old days when they would have telegrams.
Finally someone said “Why don’t you live tweet it,” and I thought “Why don’t we?” We spoke to one of Bill’s friends, Lee Carney, who loved the idea and agreed to do it for us. Lee did a magnificent job of posting details of the events as they happened. He was tweeting during the build up, details of the vows and ceremony and excerpts from the speeches. A couple of hundred people were following the day on Twitter including one of my contacts in Arizona who got up at 5.30am so she wouldn’t miss anything.
“The messages were updating throughout the day and in the end people were using it to send messages to other people in the room. In the evening they were using it to tweet song requests for the DJ!
