The sly marketing folk at Moonfruit have been able to secure Twitter's number 1 trending topic just by offering 10 free MacBook Pros as prizes over the next 10 days, the prize being selected at random from all tweets containing #moonfruit.
Think about this for a minute:
- Currently #moonfruit is being tweeted more than 10,000 times every hour, so more than 200,000/day.
- Unless you're willing to subject your poor followers to endless spam, your tweet has a miniscule chance of winning.
- Would you post an ad for a random company through your friends' doors in return for for a 1 in 200,000 chance of winning a computer? (If you did that every single day your whole life, chances are still overwhelming that you'd never win... ...and even more overwhelming that you'd end up with no friends .)
- Assuming each tweet gets seen on average by 20 people, Moonfruit are buying media "impressions" here at a CPM rate of less than 50 cents... equivalent to 'junk' space online, and easily low enough to tempt in a lot of other companies.
- Bottom line... our words and connections are being bought on the cheap! And unless the Twitterverse wises up, we'll end up getting deluged with hashtag spam.