“Come in Gilly, repeat, come in Gilly, over.” Looks like Adam Gilchrist (the batsman who always walked – yeah right) has gone bush, judging by his tweets on the Ashes series. Gilly was enlisted by UK telco, 3, for the job of celebrity tweeter in a move that could have proved a masterstroke given his inside knowledge. Alas the tweets have been few and far between and often bordered on the banal. No doubt 3’s praying for a spectacular comeback to the keyboard, otherwise this campaign will probably do the brand more harm than good.
Does giving away free stuff buy brand loyalty? Hmmm. Matthijs Roumen argues against Moonfruit’s latest marketing ploy, which has been heralded by some as ‘the first seriously successful viral Twitter campaign’. To celebrate its 10th birthday, Moonfruit decided to give away 10 MacBooks to people who included the hashtag #moonfruit in one of their tweets. And within seven days it had over 45,000 new followers. You could argue either way on the success of this campaign – Matthijs reckons the figures that really matter are less flattering – but I’m more interested in his assertion that the campaign amounted to nothing more than spam. Your thoughts, caller?
As champions of online creativity it pains (PAINS) us to reveal the success of Philips’ recent Twitter campaign. However, Matthijs Roumen has got hold of the numbers and they aren’t flash. He makes some pretty good points in his review, particularly in terms of the not-too-subtle commercial overtones. This is interesting because pages such as DellOutlet are far more commercial. Perhaps it has something to do with how upfront brands are about their motivations. If one wants to take a more matey/creative/fun approach than simply saying ‘come here for great deals and new product info’ they might need to be a bit more subtle.
Dell sales via Twitter have now passed the $3 million mark. What’s more, its Twitter page now has more than 700,000 followers. Figures like these must be every marketer’s wet dream – sales without media spend – but the PC giant has definitely put in the hard yards over the past two years. How many other brands have dedicated bloggers or a history of campaigns like Dell IdeaStorm and StudioDell? For more on the Dell story see Igor Beuker’s latest post.
Venture capitalist Fred Wilson (who has more than a few shares in Twitter) “predicts that at current growth rates, Twitter [and Facebook] will surpass Google [as a source of traffic] for many websites in the next year.” Wow. Find out what else he had to say at the 140 Characters Conference.
This competition to promote the release of Terminator Salvation: Resistance 2018 is now closed but it’s a good example of the buzz brands can create using Twitter. In a nutshell, folk were encouraged to join the human resistance and help decode communications intercepted on Twitter. I’m not sure what the prizes were. But I like the fact the Terminator people are now encouraging feedback so they can deliver bigger, better games in the future. After all, not every brand invites criticism.
Now this is what I call quality use of technology. The good people at Poke in London have created a tweeter system for the bakery next door to let locals know when their favourite bun is fresh out of the oven.
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