This week's post comes from Elisa Peimer, one of Oren Hope's founding partners.
Since I wrote about Twitter a couple of months ago, I’ve been Twittering along – tweeting about music, life, and work, and catching up on friends through their tweets. Occasionally, I like to check out the trending topics to see what people are talking about. Generally, it’s what I expect – Michael Jackson, the political situation in Iran, Wimbledon, or the hot celebrity of the moment.
But the other day I saw the top trending topic was something called #moonfruit. What the heck was moonfruit, and why was everybody talking about it? Intrigued, I clicked on over, only to find that moonfruit wasn’t a story at all, or even any kind of discussion. It’s a promotion, run by web development firm Moonfruit.
To celebrate their tenth birthday, they’re giving away a Macbook Pro every day for ten days. To enter, you have to include the tag #moonfruit in your Twitter posts. Each posting is entered into the contest for a random drawing, which means the more posts you include the tag in, the more chances you have to win. Consequently, thousands of people are tagging #moonfruit in their posts, skyrocketing the tag right to the top of the Trending Topics list. Which means it’s on every Twitter user’s front page, which means that people like me, who’ve never heard of Moonfruit, are clicking on it to see what it is.
Moonfruit has managed to get in front of hundreds of thousands of potential clients on one of the world’s most popular websites for two whole weeks, with the kind of promotion that’s so simple it’s been done for ages. It’s the Web 2.0 version of an enter-to-win box – fill out a form, drop in your entry, and hope for the best. Except that now, all you have to do is type the tag into your tweet and you’ve entered the contest. But what makes this so much more powerful is that each entry is shared with all of your Twitter followers, so the contest and the company awareness spread in a classic example of viral marketing.
I have got to say that this is one of the most brilliant marketing schemes I’ve seen in a long time.
Article comments
1 - Lance Brown
One problem with their promotion is that Twitter has a major bug in their search index, which has left untold thousands of twitterers out of search (and #hashtag tracking). It remains to be seen whether folks in that position are having their entries actually entered in the contest at all. Moonfruit hasn't answered my queries about it.
2 - carrie leber
thanks for the info - I saw the trending topic too and had to google it to find out what it is!
3 - Bob S.
Pretty smart. Annoying, but smart.
4 - keith patton
brilliant, but very annoying. won't it be awesome when we're all hashtagging our posts to enter competitions, what a great place twitter will be.
5 - Kunal Kripalani
A very effective campaign that leverages the frictionless propagation of information on Twitter.
Yes, #Moonfruit made it to the top of the Trends list, but after a couple of days, they were yanked by the powers that be at Twitter. The same thing happened to #squarespace when they ran a similar 30 iPhones over 30 days campaign in June.
Adding hashtags to Tweets is a fairly common practice, but its main purpose is to associate relevance to a topic. As such, Twitter's response to, let's call it commercial abuse, is understandable.
We will continue to see more # competitions in the future and the prizes will only get bigger.