We’re Giving Away 3 Bushels of Moonfruit …*

Several months ago, Moonfruit, a free website builder, made a splash on Twitter by giving away ten free Macintosh computers in ten days. They ran their contest by co-opting the hashtag functionality on Twitter. This second-hand spam technique was very effective in one sense. A tweetload of people wrote #moonfruit a twitzillion number of times, and it was the top trending topic for about a week.

While I can partially agree with those who say this is effective Twitter promotion, I want to discuss how mere effective promotion can be a defective goal. Effective Twitter promotion does not automatically translate into any real return on influence. Even though Moonfruit got a momentary spike for their brand, this contest failed to build any relationship.

What’s wrong with a spike?

Take a look at the Google Insights graph for Moonfruit.

That spike is the Twitter contest. If you look at the corresponding searches for that spike you get this:

What this means is that the word Moonfruit meant nothing to the Twitterers. People were re-Tweeting because they wanted a MacBook. There is no demonstrable corresponding rise in interest for free websites. This contest cast an extremely wide net, but the fishes they should have been targeting — developers, small businesses, Moonfruit’s natural target market — got away.

Build relationships with contests — as with all content

We’ve written in the past about the Create-Share-Engage model. You have to create content that your customers will find valuable, share it with them, and then engage with them, using the content as the starting point.

When all goes well, this engagement will stimulate a response where they, in turn, share your content and even create their own content in response to it, exposing your brand to their friends and audience.

Effective contests need to add kinetic energy to one or more parts of this process. In some cases, contests are primarily creating content for your brand — e.g. video, pictures, reviews. In others, they’re sharing content you’ve created. And in other cases, contests are engaging — answering questions, looking for answers, etc.

Create

The Moonfruit contest was the epitome of empty content. Not only is #moonfruit empty, it was also meaningless to the Twitter community. Sure, some people had some fun with it, but only because it’s a fun word to say. As content, it was babble.

This could have been done differently by not having a hashtag be the only content. In a more successful contest, audience content creation would be a component. Or at least there would be some shareable content that increases awareness of something.

Share

On the level of share, Moonfruit obviously had tremendous success. But since the content was meaningless, the sharing too was devoid of value. For this reason it was just as likely to piss people off as it was to entertain them.

Many people are considering this misuse of trending topics as the new generation of spam. It devalues the channel and your brand.

The model should be Create-Share-Engage. So for a quality contest, if you want the sharing to be meaningful, you have to start the process with content creation and let the contestants pick up at this phase. Enable them to share something more than a novel-sounding word.

Engage

Engagement is ultimately where this contest failed. Even though the hashtag was shared twitteen-thousand times, it is meaningless. Twitter as a platform is good for building and fostering long-term relationships with customers, but in this case Moonfruit built up relationships with people looking for free laptops — a very different audience than those people looking to build websites.

You have to give people something they can actually sink their teeth into in order for them to engage for real.

It’s not enough that people know the name of your brand anymore — although that is still essential. You need to give people opportunities to interact with your brand, and you need to offer value with each interaction. If you are going to use a contest to do this, you need to go deeper than Moonfruit did.

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*This title is just a joke. We are not giving away any fruit of any kind, Moonfruit or otherwise.

About the author

Josh Cole - Josh Cole was born to create content -- from his pioneering works in anarchoustic and hobophonic sounds & web content to writing across a wide variety of media. Joining the team in Spring 2009, he has been instrumental in crafting and producing oodles of content for Breville, Putnam Investments, and Tippingpoint Labs. He rides a near mint 1964 Raleigh Colt to work. He still remembers which accessories go with each G.I. Joe action figure. He writes with the kung-fu action grip. Josh is in charge of content for a variety of clients. His favorite Tippingpoint Labs value is: "There is a content solution to every business challenge."