Paul Smith on His Quest to Prove That Technology Enables Better Ideas and Storytelling

It’s hard to remember the pre-social media era when folks called each other on the phone to give “status updates” and all the tweeting was done by actual birds. Certainly, there are some advantages to an uber-connected world, namely the fact that our ability to make personal connections is no longer confined to a single zip code. Just ask Paul Smith, who traveled from England to New Zealand via Twitter, relying on his new “friends” to put him up for the night, feed him a meal and give him a ride to his next destination.

Trusting people you know only online — and strictly by some cleverly devised handle (Smith goes by Twitchhiker) — may seem like an express route to the back of a milk carton, but Smith lived to tell the tale and parlay his tech savvy into a new career. We caught up with the author of Twitchhiker: How One Man Travelled the World by Twitter to find out why he did it and what’s next.

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Traveling the world via Twitter comes off a bit novelty on the surface. What was the most challenging aspect of proving that you’re not just a gimmick and that this wasn’t something you just woke up one morning and decided to do?
The thing was, it was something I woke up one day and decided to do. Coming at it from a marketing perspective, I had the idea in a supermarket one day and I quickly realized that, if I attempted to do this as myself, that I’d have potentially less credibility, that I wouldn’t be taken as seriously, that people wouldn’t talk about it as such. So, I guess the brand I created to do it was based more on a gimmick, in that coming up with the name “Twitchhiker” was very deliberate. It needed something which sounded a little cliché. It sounded a little odd, but actually said what it was I was trying to do. So, it was quite deliberate, because I realized it needed something catchy in order for people to talk about it and for me to grow the proposition and for people to come on board with it.

So, you knew in advance that you wanted to take this trip but, at the same time, did you always have plans of monetizing and profiting from it?
No, not at all. I honestly didn’t do that. At the time, I was a writer but I didn’t have any intentions of writing a book. The book deal didn’t appear until six months later after I finished. By taking the trip, I lost about $3,000 in lost work and in phone bills. So the point of it wasn’t longevity, and it wasn’t to have some sort of legacy to it. It was more to just explore that spontaneity of having an idea and technology enabling it to happen instantly. So, within an hour of thinking of it, I had the domain name and the Twitter account, and 48 hours later I’d launched a website and I’d started pushing the message out, and people were already reacting to it. So, it was more an exercise in how technology enables ideas, rather than anything that I looked to feather my nest with.

So considering how much you lost before you got the book deal, did you feel as though the trip was worth it? Did you think it was an experiment well done?
I don’t know how well done it was; I could have probably done it better. But, yeah, absolutely. Of course, it was worth it. We all spend our days having whimsical ideas and never trying them because we have mortgages, and we have jobs, and we only have so much vacation and we have responsibilities. But I’ve got all of those things as well, and had them all then four years ago. But if we don’t actually believe in ourselves and our ideas once in a while, then what’s the point of anything, if we don’t actually just try things out that are different and unusual?

So, how did you land the book deal?
The book deal came about because of Twitter. The story was original, and I did it as the first person to try something like that using Twitter (although it’s been attempted since), and the story sort of disseminated around the world. I had a Twitter search running on Tweetdeck to tell me when people talk about Twitchhiker, and every couple of weeks it would appear in another newspaper and there would be a couple hundred tweets about it that would appear. And eventually it caught the attention of an editor at a publisher in the UK. He just got in touch by Twitter and said, “Do you want to talk about a book?” So Twitter sourced the book deal. Twitter ended up sourcing the cover; we found the artist who provided the cover for that book and my next book through Twitter, as well. So everything comes back to Twitter in the end.

We’ve heard of the Craigslist killer and other people who have been taken advantage of via social media. As you traveled the world, how did you vet each “friend” to ensure your own safety?
Um, I didn’t entirely. There was a rule on the trip that if more than one person offered me help, I got to choose who I picked. But if I only got one, I had to take it. The thing with Twitter is, actually, if it’s an active account and people post on there on a regular basis, and they don’t just retweet all the time, but they actually post some opinions and thoughts, you get to profile them pretty easy. You can normally see what people get mad about and sad about. You get an understanding of their life and their domestic situation. So that was quite reassuring because, for everyone who would offer, I would go back through their timeline for a couple months and see what sort of person I was about to get involved in.

But there was times when I didn’t do that. There was this guy in New Zealand who was very, very keen to put me in the back of his white van, and he used caps lock quite a lot, and he was very shouty at me. And there was another guy in New York who put a bounty on my head for $500 to see me killed. So they were kind of interesting. But, ultimately they didn’t impact on the trip. And everyone I met was brilliant and giving, and I guess it’s that kind of project and event that attracts that sort of person. But other people tried to derail it; other people tried to get me into trouble, but they were very much the minority.

So what’s next for you, and what do you ultimately want to be known for in your career?
I started actually, last night, looking up trips to Campbell Island to try to finish that bit off. This next year, it’ll be five years since I did the trip. So I’ve been thinking about a trip back to New Zealand. What’s next? I think more travel writing; I still do a lot of that. Also, my day job now is running an early-stage startup accelerator for digital teams. So, I look after teams from all over the world and bring them to Newcastle [England] and find them funding and help them with their ideas. What do I want to be remembered for? I don’t know. Just [being] the guy who helped people. That’s my job now: helping people out… I don’t know; I’ve no idea. No one’s ever asked that question. Just not being a dick. That’s a good one.

Paul Smith’s tips for using social media to launch your brand:
1. Just do it. “There’s only so much planning you can do. Until you take the first step and experiment and try it and play and then seek the feedback that comes from that, then you’ll never know. Just go out there and just get on with it.

2. Know your medium. “Twitter is a conversation. If you don’t engage people, then you’re just shouting into a vacuum. So if you have something to say, make sure it’s relevant or engaging or interesting.”

3. Be authentic. “People aren’t looking for heroes. If you have frailties, there’s nothing wrong with sharing them, and you become a lot more believable as a person.”

Andrea Williams is a freelance writer based in Nashville. Contact her at williamsandread@yahoo.com.