Spambots are all the rage on twitter at the moment, with people accumulating hundreds of followers posing as naked ladies who are actually just trying to promote their product. This isn’t appreciated among the twittersphere (and nor should it!) but the question is when is the line crossed when it comes to promotion of a product or person on Twitter?
One example was a competition Moonfruit posted on twitter. This campaign gave away a MacBook pro every day for 7 days to people who twittered the hashtag #moonfruit, which resulted in the brand name Moonfruit being one of the most talked about brands in the twittersphere at the time. This technique wasn’t appreciated by all and was eventually removed by twitter with some marketers seeing this as spam.
Another equally contentious use of promotion was the publicity that Voltz drinks gained recently about a blog post promotion. The blog post talks about the blogger meeting a celebrity whereupon she told him that he should be drinking Voltz to help him keep a ’slinky waistline’. The endorsement of the brand in a blog post by someone who didn’t visibly represent Voltz drinks in a blatant use of promotion wasn’t welcomed by all.
However, the brand has been talked about online, which is ultimately what Voltz will have been aiming for. They have their name out there and people who have read the article will remember this brand name over another drinks brand which will have been their primary aim I should imagine. This doesn’t mean that people who recognise the brand name will necessarily buy the drink over another brand because of it but (some) people will now recognise it and might even buy it should they see it in the shops. And this is the same with Moonfruit too, they wanted to promote the brand name ‘Moonfruit’ and it was ultimately talked about in the social media world.
The question is where the line is drawn between promotion and spam on twitter, and who gets to decide this. Ultimately, in the two examples above, the decision lay with the twittersphere.
Tags: Blogging, brand, promotion, social media, twitter
All depends on what sort of marketing people are into, i think. No doubt there are spammer marketers who make money out of what they do. But spam marketing must be boring to do and hard work in the long-term. The alternative is to attract attention by marketing which is relevant and of interest/use to audiences. More interesting (more varied ways of attracting audiences). Might be harder work in the short-term, but once you get things off the ground, easier in the long-term.