Is #moonfruit a good strategy?
An interesting example of the boundaries between spam and promotion: #moonfruit. By tweeting this hashtag, Twitterers are entered into a daily prize draw to win a Macbook Pro. Mashable thinks they’re doing this right (compared to other failed tweet-about-us campaigns).
What are the key ingredients for success?
- Give away something that makes people froth at the mouth. (Apple products tend to have this effect.)
- Encourage multiple tweets, over time, to ensure constant visibility among trending topics (Daily draw only uses the previous day’s tweets, so people have to keep tweeting to win.)
- Have visible, happy, real, winners.
Yet this has annoyed people, as it’s encouraged a flurry of spammy messages – leading to the question ‘will he who spams most win?’. Is the draw normalised? Does it take into account multiple accounts, or syndicates? There are so many ways to game something like this, it’s fortunate it’s only a 10-day promotion.
Will it leave a nasty taste in some people’s mouths? Undoubtedly. But it’s certainly got Twitter talking about Moonfruit. Is there no such thing as bad publicity? Sentiment classification, or other filtering, might help us understand what people think about Moonfruit – or whether they just want to win a laptop. (Almost undoubtedly the latter, no?) But when you’re just after volume, does the content matter?
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