Over the weekend the hottest topic on Twitter wasn’t Michael Jackson, Honduran Coups d’etat or Roger Federer’s win at Wimbledon (congrats Roger by the way) no in fact it was a competition run by website creation offering Moonfruit.
For those who didn’t see it, Moonfruit were giving away a Macbook Pro every day for ten days. All you had to do to be in to win was to use the hashtag #moonfruit in a tweet after which Moonfruit’s “algorithm” would chose a winner.
In the few minutes that it took me to write the above two paragraphs – my Twitter search for Moonfruit has delivered up an astonishing 219 results; but I’m going to go out on a limb and say… “so what?”
Of the thousands of people who have inserted the Moonfruit hashtag into a tweet (and I’ll confess – I’m one of them) who has a clue what Moonfruit actually does? I only checked their site in order to write this post, have no intention of using their services and am certain that in a weeks time I’ll not even remember who they are.
Moonfruit was leveraging what many would term spam 2.0, that is user generated spam. In the same way that Web 2.0 is all about users creating content for a site (a la Youtube) spam 2.0 is all about making web users want to fill the role of spam bots.
But just like traditional spam, the Moonfruit campaign is, in my curmudgeonly opinion, destined to fail.
Of course I might think differently if I’d won a Macbook pro…
Update – It seems the Twitter folks may have had some concerns about what campaigns like Moonfruit’s might do to their service. More here.
Related posts:
- Maybe Twitter Trends Shouldn’t Be Entirely Automated?
- Twitter Can Be Good for Business
- New Poll: Should Twitter moderate Trending Tropics to prevent it from being spammed?
Of course some think differently: http://mashable.com/2009/07/05/socmedia-week-july/
Having joined in with #moonfruit I’d have to say the same Ben, but there’s another story that says maybe they have a point in their madness!
I hassled a colleague of mine the other day for sending out an almost identical email four times over five days, full of some long copy and a 95% off deal. All it didn’t have was that highlight text we see on some sites selling e-books on SEO.
I called him for almost spamming me, and hoped his unsubs hadn’t gone north. I did say I could be talking out of my backside.
Tom came back with the news that sales had increased [# of, not profit] and unsubs had been minimal. I served my bum on toast that night.
Moonfruit might be onto the same thing. Whilst there peers call them spammers, they’re the ones who’ve been dealing with increased #s of ‘new’ customers. How many stay past the free period and become long term customers only time will tell.
They’re certainly enjoying their 15 minutes of fame
Adrian
The interesting part is, in my opinion, not the fact that you see #moonfruit everywhere but more the fact that to know if you have won or not, you need to follow their Twitter account (@moontweet).
This one has reach more than 42k followers today and was certainly not that high a few days ago.
Who are those followers. Well, obviously people wanting a MacBook Pro which tends to be on Internet, often people that could possibly want to create websites (web designers, developers, bloggers, …).
Moonfruit has now built in a few days a huge channel of communication to a quality list of people.
So, even if the # was spam 2.0, the @ was smart.
This said spam to me from the word go. But lets face it, spam would stop if it wasn’t successful.
Heck, I’d like to win the MacBook Pro.
The name moonfruit is intriguing in itself and would have garnered the curiosity of a lot of Tweeps.
If the website counter on the Moonfruit homepage is anything to go by, the number of websites made using their application is climbing by over 1000 each day. They reckon website traffic to their site jumped 6 fold and the rate of signups has doubled as a result of the campaign.
I agree, the campaign turned into a Spamfest and Moonfruit could have done a better job. But if you look at the articles on Techcrunch, BBC, and Moonfruitlounge, you will notice that there are substantially more positive comments about the campaign than negative, so while the masses remain receptive, expect to see more of this type of campaign. No doubt Twitter will start to police things better as they improve their systems, and the community will also start to produce applications that allow us to block certain hashtags.
Yves, follwing @moontweet was not a requirement to find out if you’d won. Everyone just assumed they had to. Daily winners were published on the Moonfruit website. I think we will see Moontweet’s follower base decline over the coming days.