To spam or not to spam…
Yesterday morning I jumped on the #moonfruit bandwagon. The chance of a free Macbook Pro for one simple tweet – why not? Now I feel a bit like a dirty spammer…
The first time I was really aware of using hashtags for a giveaway was the blog hosting software Squarespace. For the month of June they gave away an iPhone a day. All you had to do was add a #squarespace hashtag into one of your tweets. It didn’t even have to be Squarespace related.
Initially it seemed like a nice idea. Squarespace are a really nice blogging platform and seem relatively unknown. Twitter users are their ideal target audience, so the strategy seemed like a pretty neat idea.
Unfortunately it went a little off course when the tweet only had to contain the tag #squarespace and didn’t have to actually be related to the product. (Also, they didn’t actually give you an iPhone) The winner was picked at random, so the messages often ended up adding no value to other users and were completely out of context.
Again, this only occurred to me yesterday afternoon when #moonfruit seemed to be taking over my Twitter stream. I love Twitter because based on the people I follow I can cultivate the content stream. When half of that becomes crowded with unrelated hashtags and messages I didn’t like it, even though I was a part of it that morning.
I’m pretty sure there is or was a really good concept in this hashtag strategy. Pick a geeky product for a geeky audience and let them advertise it for you. Unfortunately, I think that was lost along the way. And as more unrelated #moonfruit tweets pour in today I worry about the relevance it holds and how easy it is to turn us into spammers for the chance of a shiny macbook.
I hope that despite Squarespace’s and Moonfruit’s success in creating a lot of noise around their brand, other Marketers can see the difference between users wanting a free iPhone/Macbook Pro and not wanting a tube of toothpaste or something. Hopefully this doesn’t become another method for spammers (or us) to attack the Twittersphere 
I’ve started unfollowing people who persistently enter these – don’t want spam in my feed – and it puts me off the companies encouraging people to spam their name/service too!
I actually thought up until till 2secs ago that squarespace.com was a clever URL thought up by Barry Pace, and I pronounced squares pace.