Due to server problems we could not publish the Twitter Friday column last week. Now we’re back up. So here it is. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Some #moonfruit anybody? Yesterday’s no name is today’s superstar when it comes to effective so called “hashtag” Twitter marketing. It’s goal is to make it to the Twitter.com homepage popular topics list. Some already consider it spam. Why?

Moonfruit made people tweet their hashtag in order to win a prize. Their success was immediate, huge and long lasting. I won’t tell you what prize was offered in order not to advertise both the product and the company too much. They give away one prize per day to one of the thousands of people who tweet something adding their hashtag to it. So in a way it’s an indirect pay per tweet scheme.

While RWW already attacks all marketers as spammers (good old link baiting strategy) the issue at stake is more than marketing vs spam or even marketing = spam.

It’s also about free speech as the anti-spam filters already have blocked false positives. The most obvious example of this is the hashtag #MrsSlocombesPussy a popular one among UK users and a censored one by the US Twitter admins with no understanding of British humor.

As a SEO I encounter the spam accusation quite frequently as you can imagine although I haven’t spammed anybody in my whole life. Thus I won’t accept this as well. First let me say something about Twitter and marketers to challenge the “Twitter needs a marketer filter” linkbait:

Statistics show that marketers are the hard core users of Twitter.

The most active Twitter users are marketers statistically. Knowing sites like Digg and elsewehere this is no surprise to you. Marketers actually need new media tools to spread their message thus they promote those tools that work in the desired way to stardom. Where would Twitter be today without all the marketers who uised an evangelized it for free? It would be another me too service among a myriad of startups.

When using Twitter correctly you barely get any spam. I don’t in spite of following approx. 400 marketers ;-) Unless of course you assume that links about marketing and SEO are spam like the average disgruntled teenage geek on Digg does while promoting Apple marketing messages at the same time.

Twitter itself did not remove the #moonfruit campaign. So obviously the staff does not consider it to be spam. To be honest: I think the line almost got crossed. We may see lots of copycats of that tactic soon so Twitter will probably act then. To me spam begins when you actually bribe people to say things. In this case it was almost bribery. Or when people promote things frantically just ta take part in a competition. One tweet about #moonfruit, two or three OK but more than that? If I were Twitter I’d curb this by a single line of code. Watch out, pseudo code ahead:

“If hashtag mentions more than 3 times by same user on same day delete from search and don’t count in popularity”

How would I undertake an ethical Twitter #hashtag marketing campaign? I would

• not make the use of a particular hashtag obligatory. Usually people use a similar wording so at the end of the day you’d get popular anyways.
• limit the number of tweets per user by stating that more than one tweet does not enhance the actual chances of winning
• predefine a few tweets a person can use so that the effort of taking part gets minimized
• require people to have a certain number of mutual friends in order to prevent setting up fake accounts
• choose an intriguing word for the hashtag or slogan, part of the moonfruit success stems from the brand’s funny sounding name

One of the secrets of a successful marketing campaign is not to oversell and annoy people. The “any publicity is good publicity” proponents will disagree but what’s the use of a huge success when you get banned for it or there is a negative backlash for your brand like with the Oprah-KFC disaster?

Also note that nowadays not all popular items are hashtags so that you don’t even need a #hashtag probably. So don’t simply try to copy the for some people questionable success of the #moonfruit campaign. Be yourself and don’t try to bribe people.

Btw. I will try the Moonfruit service. I love their competitors Jimdo already! On the weekend another case of Twitter bombing has been done by some pranksters.

Tags: hashtags, moonfruit, spam, tweet to win, twitter bombing
Posted in social media, twitter |