Anyway, thank you Ziming for your response and agreeing to tweet on the 3rd. I'm not asking you to believe it will work, just to show some solidarity with the rest of the fanbase who are at least trying. What would be the best way to remind you the day before?
I'll try and address your concerns though, since you were good enough to explain. The purpose of the Tweetathon, and what makes it different to previous campaigns, is that our tweets aren't for the direct attention of Sega. A lot of people do @mention Sega's account, and that's fine (as long as Sega doesn't get them suspended for spam...), but the intention is to create a high enough volume of visible unrest, concentrated on one day on a platform as public as Twitter, that even Sega's higher-ups become acutely aware of how their company looks when they ignore the fans.
We all know that Sega's social media team won't bother to pass our message up the chain of command, and even if they did, it wouldn't carry the same weight. "Shenmue fans keep tweeting us every month," as a condensed report, means very little. The aim is to circumvent the front line so that Sega's decision makers either see the hashtag trending with their own eyes, or hear their PR guys deducing "We have an image problem here..." Because the longer they ignore a public display of mass dissatisfaction, the worse their company looks not just to Shenmue fans, but to everyone who can see the Shenmue fans' tweets (and the hashtag, if it routinely hits the top trends list).
I personally have no interest in Mass Effect 3 (having not started the series yet), but if Bioware and EA had done nothing to placate the fans who were upset by the lack of a "real" ending, then as a consumer and potential customer of theirs, I'd have thought less of them. But if those fans hadn't been so organized and loud, I'd have never known or cared.
Sure, the fact there are more current Mass Effect fans than Shenmue fans helped their cause a lot, so we have a greater uphill battle to create the same outcry, but we're getting there. We're moving in the right direction, participation is growing and we've already had recognition by people in and around the industry. Now the only way to find out how far this can go... is to keep going.
If it goes nowhere, then at least we tried. We took a new approach, and we did what we could with it. But in doing so, we'll have galvanized a large number of non-hardcore Shenmue fans who would never participate in a forum like this, but will have adopted a routine of signing onto Twitter on the 3rd of each month with the aim of making Shenmue 3 a reality. That makes them readily available for any other campaign activity that may be developed down the road. So at the very least, we'll have paved the way for the next big idea, if this one doesn't go according to plan.
And ultimately, as 1UP said in their article, we've got people talking about Shenmue again. We're keeping the game alive in the public consciousness, which is what I believe you're trying to do with your gameplay videos Ziming, so this is well worth your support. But even if you don't believe that, I'm glad you'll be playing along anyway. Thanks again.