Twitter Spam or a Successful Viral Marketing Campaign?
It's June 30th 2009, and Moonfruit is celebrating it's 10th anniversary. A startup reborn. In the last 10 years they've raised money, grown to 65 staff, shrunk back down to the 2 founding partners, and now it looks as though their product, a web site building business might have found it's time.
My interest lies in how they shot back from virtual anonymity to the forefront of the media's attention. How did they put their business back on the map?. Hashtags. Specifically this one - #moonfruit. Which was the top trending term on Twitter during the campaign. For 10 days they promised to give away 1 Macbook Pro for every year they've been in business. All people needed to do was to add the #moonfruit hashtag to their tweet and the winner of that days Macbook would be chosen at random. Moonfruit later added an 11th MacBook for the best designed site using their service, very smart way to increase engagement.
Was the Twitter drive a success? Well lets take a look at the stats:
- 444, the number of followers before the campaign
- 44,256, the number of followers at the end of the campaign
- 30,000 the number of followers retained after it all died down
- Accounted for 2.5% of all twitter traffic on day 2
- Traffic to moonfruit.com increased 1,300%
- Sign ups for their service - up 100%
- 4, the number of google pages they jumped for their natural search ranking terms. A result of buzz, trending and the associated press coverage this campaign garnered.
No one can argue that it's delivered them amazing results. That they were one of the first to innovate with a hashtag campaign. They ran a completely transparent, honest and highly viral campaign. Congratulations must be paid to them for this. However, as with any new space there's always a period of pushing boundaries and finding the balance between what the community will stand for and what they deem to be unacceptable spam.
A new kind of spam. Well not quite, viral spam has been around forever; text messages, emails, and hand written letters before that. This user generated spam (UGS), to some is an annoyance - here and here. To others an opportunity to join the party and get themselves a free MacBook. As with anything that appears easy to participate in, do we take the time to identify the opportunity before jumping in? It seems not:
- #moonfruit was being tweeted around 200,000 times per day
- 1 in 200,000 the odds of you winning that MacBook.
Did anybody stop and think if a 1 in 200,000 chance of winning was worth polluting your stream with spam? Risk loosing "twitter friends" over? No of course not. It was quick, simple and harmless - and I want one of those MacBooks!
So what was it? Spam or an innovative new approach to viral marketing. I'd say both, but what an excellent campaign and all credit to the team at Moonfruit for recognising the path beaten by Squarespace, learning from it, and delivering a brilliant marketing campaign.
Comments
Interesting input but I also found some really nice twitter tips at 10bomb.com so you might want to check it out.
Marylee
Personal twitter is just a tool, its about the conversation. If a company tries to grow their follower base using a competition they will be succesful for the short term, its not a long term strategy as most of those people would of just wanted the prize and not care about the business doing the competition.
I think that this time it was a very successful marketing campaign for both moonfruit and squarespace, but I don't think it will be particularly successful for anyone else.
It was a very novel and innovative way for these two organisation to use twitter for marketing their products. It certainly spread the word very quickly. Unfortunately for them, the longer the campaign went on the more irritating it became and eventually Twitter blocked "#moonfruit" from trending topics.
It also caused a lot of "bad blood" between users and their followers who didn't seem to realise how annoying they were being and, as Andi says, became a good way of culling users from your stream.
I believe twitter now blocks these kinds of campaigns from their trending topics (don't quote me on that) and with the changes to the way replies work and the impending changes to retweets mean that the casual user is unlikely to pick up on these marketing campaigns as readily as they did with moonfruit and squarespace.
I also don't think people will tolerate the continual "abuse" of their twitter streams with any future campaigns.
Some how, some way, agencies and companies will need to come up with a different way to use twitter for viral marketing campaign.
Anyway, that's just my 2p on this topic. I'm most-likely entirely wrong and someone will create a fantastic viral hashtag campaign.
That's the thing Andi. There's two sides to this story, some are annoyed by it, others unfazed.
They did generate some bad faith, but after the dust settled the numbers speak for themselves. As with all advertising/ marketing efforts there are always going to be some who are offended and others who win MacBooks :-)
Interesting times as we explore this new space.
Personally, I found it a very convenient method of culling my Twitter stream. I like to keep the signal-to-noise ratio as high as possible - and anyone who thought a miniscule chance of winning a laptop was worth spamming definitely fell into the second category!
Fair enough, it seemed to work pretty well for Moonfruit (and later, Squarespace). But even these two campaigns generated a fair amount of bad faith, and any further attempts will probably suffer pretty severe diminishing returns. You have to assume that this isn't going to be a great addition to any marketing toolkits any time soon...
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