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Moonfruit could kill Twitter
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"#Moonfruit!"
Using a hashtag and a ten MacBook Pros as bait, Moonfruit topped Twitter trends for the entire week.
At one point, #Moonfruit was being tweeting over 10,000 per hour.
Who/what is #moonfruit and why could it kill Twitter?
Moonfruit was the idea of a ten year old website business to grab some buzz to celebrate their 10th year anniversary.
The idea was to enter anyone who tweeted #moonfruit in a random drawing to win one of the ten MacBook Pro computers they were offering.
More than 200,000 posts a day at it's peak, winning became a very long shot.
But more importantly, there is a growing backlash against #moonfruit because it is taking on the look as spam.
Despite the ongoing criticism that people using Twitter to discuss mundane, boring, and uneventful parts of their lives - or to link to a blog or video clip that is pure entertainment and of no value, it has been accepted because it is a personal communication. A personal communication that is shared instantly with their crowd of followers.
Some of these personal items get viral exposure via re-tweeting.
By adding in an incentive to tweet, the user is participating in spreading spam. It's the same as forwarding an email spam. Moonfruit didn't make any strong requirements to include a sales pitch in order to qualify to win.
But the mere fact that the hashtag for #moonfruit was strictly a publicity stunt certainly will lead other non-creative marketing officials to launch their own version of the stunt.
This could kill Twitter as the conversations become cluttered with meaningless hashtags. It worked, people are tweeting #moonfruit, and stories are being written.
This will be one of the first, if not the first, successful advertising campaigns that leveraged Twitter. And it could kill it in the long run.
A Moonfruit spokesperson called Joe says
"There is no doubt we wanted to create buzz, but we didn't expect it to get so big. If you read the customer posts the overwhelming majority are very positive and people are playing with the name and being very creative. We're trying to shift things towards this more creative response as this is in line with our company objective of creating websites and empowering people to do so."
Get ready for a deluge of hashtag spam from your online social network.
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