stormbrew

Just read the blog post on Mashable calling the #moonfruit twitter tag “twitter promotion done right” and I couldn’t disagree more.

Purely from a financial perspective, I doubt it’s worth it. They are giving away 10 MacBook Pros. Each is worth, most likely, somewhere around $2500. So they are spending $25,000 on this promotion. This is a good $10k (or more) more than Squarespace would have spent on their supposedly ‘bad’ promotion (so labeled only because they were giving away gift cards and not actual devices), for a shorter amount of time on the trending topics list (10 days instead of 30). So if their goal was to have eyes taking in their name as often as possible for as long as possible, they’ve already done a worse job than Squarespace.

If their goal is to produce conversions in the traditional sense, then I suspect this sort of thing has a similar conversion rate as spam. Only they know the real conversion rate, obviously. Since this is so new a way of marketing, there isn’t even any precedent to work from. But my gut feeling is that most people who retweet moonfruit don’t care at all *what* moonfruit is. The 10 people who win may feel more engaged in the company, but the other million or so will just wander off never even googling the term (I know I haven’t). I really wonder if this will turn out better for them than buying $25,000 worth of google ads. That would get them 250 million ad serves at $0.10 cpm.

To me, for a viral marketing campaign to be done right, it must have actually engaged the audience somehow. Passing your company name along in a giant game of telephone doesn’t engage anyone, nor does it help anyone know what you are. I think if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that a name attached to nothing is worth nothing. I wouldn’t be surprised if a poll of people participating in this campaign didn’t reveal a huge portion of them think it’s a promotion being put on by Apple. Or someone in their basement who stole a bunch of MacBooks.

And in the long run, I can’t imagine these campaigns working out well. I expect that we’ll soon see another. And then another after that. And then two at once. Hopefully at some point they fizzle out, because this is going to become a far more offensive form of spam than anything Twitter has seen so far. I can easily ignore follow requests from FirstLast23423, but half the people on my feed making inane #moonfruit posts? Nope, those are a little harder.

I commend experimentation and attempts to find newer, more engaging ways to advertise to people, but I think this is just the wrong way to go. There’s no entertainment value and they’re not helping me achieve anything. To me, these are the most important kinds of engagement viral marketing campaigns should strive for.

Oh, and I <3 Bees.