Inspired by a Twitter hashtag marketing campaign run by a rival company the previous month, Moonfruit, a provider of an easy to use online website creator, launched their own # campaign that offered 1 Macbook Pro to anyone in the world, everyday, for 10 days. With no constraints on the number of times you could enter and a requirement to enter each day’s draw separately, the campaign quickly turned viral and was propagated by a placement at the top of the Twitter Trends list together with massive coverage in the media. The success of the campaign in highlighted by their stellar growth in Twitter followers from 444 to ~40,000, an increase in website traffic of 600% and and increase in sign-ups of 100% for a cost of just $13,500. But is this a sustainable benefit? We look at the campaign, its results and implications for the Twitterverse.

1. What The #Moonfruit ?
A Twitter Marketing Campaign Analysis
Author: Kunal Kripalani
Social-Bug.com | Social Media Guidelines
TAG Cloud
Twitter , Social Media Strategy, Moonfruit ,
Marketing Campaign,
statistics
ROI hashtags Analysis sentiment
Abstract
Inspired by a Twitter hashtag marketing campaign run by a rival company the
previous month, Moonfruit, a provider of an easy to use online website creator,
launched their own # campaign that offered 1 Macbook Pro to anyone in the
world, everyday, for 10 days. With no constraints on the number of times you
could enter and a requirement to enter each day’s draw separately, the
campaign quickly turned viral and was propagated by a placement at the top
of the Twitter Trends list together with massive coverage in the media. The
success of the campaign in highlighted by their stellar growth in Twitter
followers from 444 to ~40,000, an increase in website traffic of 600% and
increase in sign-ups of 100% for a cost of just $13,500. But is this a
sustainable benefit? We look at the campaign, its results and implications for
the Twitterverse.
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2. “The response has been beyond belief, far more effective than other
marketing channels. We wanted to drive both brand awareness and direct
response, but this has achieved both in a far more personal way.”
Wendy Tan White, Founder of Moonfruit
Vital Statistics:
Launched Tuesday June 30 2009: 444 followers
Ended Tuesday July 7 2009: 44,113 followers
Traffic to Moonfruit.com: Increased 600%
Sign Ups: Increased 100%
Cost: Approximately US$13,500
A snapshot from the July 4th Techcrunch article shows 2,159,297 vs July
7th: 2,167,375. That's about 2,690 new websites per day (let's assume these
are new sign-ups.)
Update: July 8th: 2,170,702. 3327 more sign ups. Or an increase in sign up
rate of: 23% vs. the average sign up rate for the previous 3 days. This is a
good sign for Moonfruit. While it is still early days, this increase in post
campaign activity bodes well for them.
Update: July 17th: 2,182,462: 11,760 more signups over 9 days or 1306 / day.
The sign up rate appears to have dropped an average of 61% since July 8th,
2009.
Techcrunch MoonFruit A Newer MoonFruit Homepage
Homepage Snapshot on July Snapshot on July 7
4th
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3. TweetStats: Most Popular Tweep on July 7 2009 was Moontweet
Moonfruit (@moontweet) Activity. Proof that it's not what you say, it's how you say it?
Moonfruit have traditionally not done a lot of tweeting until the start of this
campaign at the beginning of July. To date, they've only made 382 tweets.
Clearly Tweeps aren't following them for the interesting conversations they
initiate.
What does Google Say?
Google Insights Top related search terms were:
moonfruit and moonfruit twitter. Most regional interest was from the USA,
followed by the UK, Canada, Brazil and Germany.
The Twitter Top Trends list combined with curiosity about the strange
#moonfruit hashtag probably helped catalyse the Moonfruit campaign, as
evidenced by Google Insights which as of July 7 2009, classifies "What is
moonfruit?" as a breakout search term.
Google Insights for Search: "Moonfruit"
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4. Follower Growth
Moontweet Followers jump with viral hashtag campaign
Twitter provides a frictionless medium in which a message can easily
propagate. After 36 hours, this resulted in:
• 20,000 followers and an increase in traffic to Moonfruit.com by 8x
(according to moonfruitlounge.com)
• Moonfruit related traffic accounted for 1.63% of all Twitter traffic and
spiked to 2.85% following Mashable's Twitter Promotion Done Right
#Moonfroot article.
• Overall, the campaign delivered a 600% increase in traffic and doubled
sign ups for Moonfruit's easy online website creation product trial.
• Spikes can bee seen that correspond with key influencer blog posts
and tweets, as well as a brief appearance in the Twitter hashtag trends
list which was removed within 2 days. #squarespace did a similar
competition for 30 iphones over 30 days which trended for two days
and then vanished. The same has happened to #moonfruit which was
on the Top Trends list on Twitter until ~ midnight July 3 UK time. This
does not accurately reflective trends of the Twiterverse as is evident
from looking at http://hashtags.org/ (see snapshot below)
• It's interesting to note that following @moontweet was not a
requirement to entering the competition (although it was suggested )
and yet they've ended up with more than 100X more followers than
they started with. One would assume that the number will drop over the
coming days.
• But is there real value in obtaining a list of followers who don't really
care about what you have to say? I don't think so, nor do I think it's
worth following people in the hopes that they might follow me back or
vice versa, which is why after an initial trial run, I stopped using the
SocialToo app.
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5. Hashtags.org uncensored top Twitter trend for July 7,2009
#moonfruit: The Twitter Campaign Details:
• Enter a competition to win a MacBook Pro. 1 given away (anywhere in
the world) for 10 days.
• Enter as many times as you like by tweeting #moonfruit and you
needed to enter each day's draw separately.
The Moonfruit Homepage encouraged you to tweet:
“Celebrate 10 years of Moonfruit and win a MacBook Pro http://bit.ly/96bxC
#moonfruit1:44 AM Jul 1st from web”
Visitors were also encouraged to follow @moonfruit, so you could learn if
you'd won, but this was not a requirement to enter the daily draws.
Mid-campaign modifications:
1. Additional prizes of iPods were on offer for the most creative
#moonfruit tweet tributes. This was to reward the participants'
creativity and also would have helped maintain a higher standard of
Tweet quality.
2. Shortened from 10 laptops over 10 days to 10 laptops over 7 days
because of the overwhelming response and increasing backlash over
the 'pollution' of the Twitter stream.
Supporting Propagation:
• Most creative #moonfruit tweets displayed on Moonfruit homepage:
Profile for the Tweeps.
• Macbook pro winners and #moonfruit creative Tweep profile names
displayed and linked on competition homepage.
• Massive coverage by the media (with secondary source like this post
adding fuel to the fire)
• Blog posts by moonfruitlounge with good community engagement
• Responsive to community questions @moonfruit
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6. Sentiment Analysis
Knowing how people feel about your brand on social networks, community
websites and any other web property that allows for a dialogue. These
include: message boards, blogs and wikis amongst others.
• Real time sentiment analysis lets you know the views of the people
within minutes (and sometimes within moments) of an expression.
• This creates an opportunity to interject and stop negative sentiment
from being amplified. It gives you an opportunity to mitigate the fallout.
• By collating a number of different points of view, you can build a picture
of how receptive people are to your brand or how your marketing
campaign is performing, and how this changes over time. So how does
Moonfruit stack up?
Audience Receptivity
• A mostly positive response with moonfruit achieiving a massive amount
of attention from the Twitterverse and also news sites including
Mashable, Techcrunch, Clickz, BBC and About.com which served to
propagate their message further.
• Many users simply added a #moonfruit reference to their regular
posts. The intriguing 'moonfruit' name worked in synergy with the
campaign objectives and piked user curiosity to find out more about the
company bringing more people into the...let's call it a Tribe (thanks
Seth Godin.)
Audience Backlash
• A small % of users considered the campaign nothing more than SPAM
and have expressed their discontent (too put things mildly) threatening
to unfollow anyone who tweeted #moonfruit.For user perspectives see
comments on Moonfruitlounge.com and BBC: Twitter too Corporate by
Half
• A quick calculation based on the number of positive vs negative
comments posted on some articles written about the #Moonfruit
campaign shows that subjectively speaking, 82% have a positive
response while 18% have expressed a negative response to the
campaign. TEDChris points out that you have a 1 / 200,000 chance of
winning so why bother? Yet, overall, there were more evangelists than
complainers.
If knowledge is power, then the company who comes out with the right
sentiment analysis algorithm will have unrivaled success (like Google's
domination of search.)
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7. Calculating ROI:
10 Macbook Pro's at retail (They probably got a bulk deal) $12,000
5 Ipods: $1500
TOTAL: US$13,500
They grew their Twitter follower base to over 40,000 gained a 6 fold increase
in website traffic and most importantly, doubled the rate of sign-ups which
should translate into atleast some revenue. Moonfruit did 11 million pounds in
sales last year. It will be interesting to see how this campaign impacts their
next set of reported results. Initial indications show that Moonfruit may get
some sustained value. The sign up rate is not slowing down post-campaign.
(up 23%.)
Community engagement and brand evangelism: Many people contributed
Moonfruit themed photos and videos in response to an offer of an iPod in
exchange for the most creative response.
Massive Press coverage (See Google News) on account of the novelty and
spectacular scale of the campaign has made Moonfruit a poster child for
marketing campaigns on Twitter.
Hijacking:
Some Tweeps have gotten into the bad habit of adding the latest trends
hashtags like #moonfruit to their tweets for the sole purpose of getting visibility
in search results. These include people advocating social causes which may
not be the right way to go about it, and then there are the spammers that are
promoting the latest 'Get rich quick' scheme and their affiliate links.
Should we be annoyed?
As Jeremiah Owyang points out, if you don't have an iconic brand with
millions of adoring fans, then as a business, you need to exploit whatever
means at your disposal to garner attention. Big brands moving to Twitter
create an additional channel to reach their customers, while a smaller
business is likely to struggle to expand their share of voice.
The problem, however, is that if every company on Twitter starts running a
hashtag centric contest, then us Tweeps are in trouble and the Twitterverse
will implode. I'm sure we will see more competitions and the prizes on offer
will only get bigger, and everyone has a price. As Sarah Perez puts it:
“But while one day that friend is tweeting to win a Macbook, another may be
tweeting to win something else. Even if only a small percentage of an ever-
shifting group of my friends tweeted a promotional message every day, it
would be enough to junk up my timeline.”
Perhaps the solution is to limit the scope of competitions? Rather than
accepting an unlimited number of entries, it could have been restricted to 1
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8. entry per person per day, or even just one entry for the duration of the
competition. Is it Twitter's responsibility to set guidelines?
Perhaps Tweetboard's launch strategy was the right approach:
You had to tweet a custom message in order to request an alpha invite like
so:
“Requesting an invite for Tweetboard Alpha (http://tweetboard.com) by
@140ware, for my site: http://social-bug.com”
Transparent, to the point, and you only ever need to do it once. No subterfuge
whatsoever.
MTV, Lenovo, Squarespace and Moonfruit were early movers in the #
competition arena and gained serendipitous benefits from the novelty of their
Twitter initiative in the form of massive press coverage. As Twitter continues
to improve its systems and Tweeps become less tolerant of their streams
becoming polluted, future attempts at hashtag competitions will simply be
copycat campaigns and will likely see less benefit.
Who's Responsibility is it?
It's clear that anything overtly commercial that causes too much bias will
become subject to censorship imposed by Twitter. Is it justified? Both
#squarespace and #moonfruit lost their Twitter trends placements within a
couple of days of their campaign launches, which is indicative of Twitter's view
on commercial bias.
So is it Twitter's responsible to police us? Or is it up to the Twitterverse to
police itself? Darren Stuart suggests that Twitter allow us to block
hashtags. A great solution, and no doubt we will see an application for it in
the near future. Twitter might even include spam filters that automatically
block Tweets containing hashtags that, for example, have been reported to
@spam 100 times. The original offending Tweep can then also be traced and
suspended. Similarly, Tad Chef suggests a simple query: “If hashtag mentions
more than 3 times by same user on same day delete from search and don’t
count in popularity”
Perhaps charging for such campaigns is one way Twitter could monetize and
also limit abuse of hashtags. Perhaps a CPM for hashtag views? Or even a
sophisticated system that scans a tweet for contextual relevance and gives it
an Adwords type quality score which is used to help control what appears in
the top trends list?
Perhaps a sustainable social marketing approach is better: Building
relationships, adding value and contributing to the conversation and serving
the interests of your brand in the long term.
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9. Final Thoughts
What long term value does the large follower base now offer Moonfruit? Will
Twitter serve as an effective direct marketing channel like it has for
@dellOutlet ?Is it like email where a small percentage of their tweets will lead
to sales? Or will Twitter continue to serve them as a brand building tool? Will
they be able to leverage their share of voice in the Twitterverse or will they
simply fade away with the end of the campaign?
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