It was inevitable. A forward thinking company in the web sector finally got together and said, “hey, we can totally own Twitter and build a HUGE buzz if we give away cool stuff and require people to hashtag their contest entries”.
Look, I’ve got nothing against that whatsoever – I love a good linkbaiting/buzzbuilding campaign. Moonfruit.com (if you hadn’t noticed) went straight to the top of the Twitter trending topics last week after announcing a contest in which they are giving away 10 Macbook pros for 10 days (well, now it’s 7 days, but I’ll explain in a sec). So why did they climb to the top so fast? Has it paid off? You bet your arse it has!
The brilliant marketers at Moonfruit.com picked a prize that everyone would LOVE to get their hands on – a Macbook Pro. I mean seriously, even if you’re not a Mac person, wouldn’t you love the chance at a brand new one FOR FREE? Of course you would – and Moonfruit knows this.
They already have a pretty impressive web presence (they offer online website building services – catered to novice webmasters). But any company that trends as the number one topic on Twitter stands a chance at a HUGE boost in PR, buzz, and most importantly – new customers.
To make a long story short, here is how your company can make it to the top of the trending topics list for at least a few days (until Twitter pulls you without explanation).
1. Decide on something to give away for a set amount of time (example – 1 Macbook Pro every day for 10 days).
2. Require that in order to win, entrants simply have to include a hashtag of your choice in their tweets (example – #moonfruit)
So lets assume that each Macbook Pro cost about $1000. For a $10k spend, Moonfruit.com managed to own the trending topics for (I believe) a couple days. I can’t imagine what kind of traffic influx they received, but I’m willing to bet that the ten grand they spent was an extremely wise investment. A company like Moonfruit can toss ten grand around like pieces of delicious cake – imagine what a Fortune 500 company could do??
The question is – will Twitter allow this? Is it considered exploitation of the “system”? Is Twitter mad because they didn’t consider early on how easy it would be to manipulate the trending topics with an amount of money that even an individual could probably swing? I think they are, because at some point, even though the #moonfruit hashtag was more popular than at least 5 other hot topics, #moonfruit was magically plucked from the list.
Who makes that decision, and why? I’m sure quite a few people (especially the marketing team at Moonfruit.com) would love to know what’s up. They suggested in their blog post that Twitter may come up with a “user trend” list and a “commercial trend” list. Okay, fair enough, but lets make something happen pretty soon, as I’m willing to bet that quite a few companies are ready to jump at the chance to be the next #moonfruit on the Twitter trend list.
I know I would be.
(Update: Moonfruit.com, due to the controversy they’re having with Twitter, is going to give out the remaining 4 Macbook Pros tomorrow, July 7th).
