Comments on: Moonfruit Bigger than Jacko

By: Phil Harper

Phil Harper — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:29:56 +0000

I agree with Gabriel Harper, not only because we share a great name, but because I think the point is valid.

Yes it’s easy to give away macbooks and get noticed, but if you’re a smaller company, can the same method work for you?

What about giving away something more interesting or unique?

By: Noah

Noah — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:58:01 +0000

To say that it could be illegal just because twitter has a flawed tweet indexing system (tweetdexing?) seems like a bit of a stretch. Its not Moonfruit’s fault, and the burden does not lie on them. You can’t expect them to stop the snowball effect they’ve created for themselves to wait on twitter, because in all likelihood they wouldn’t get that particular snowball rolling again.

By: Gabriel Harper

Gabriel Harper — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 09:18:39 +0000

“My thinking is, it�s expensive not to try stuff like this.”

Giving away 10 MacBook Pros is expensive. Especially if it’s a flop, which it is for 99% of the people who do incentivized PR campaigns like this. The idea isn’t unique.

30 seconds of research also indicate that Moonfruit has been around for ten years already, and is an Alexa 15k site. When you have a large reach to begin with, making something like this successful isn’t such a jump.

By: Lance Brown

Lance Brown — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:04:20 +0000

I admire the effectiveness of the campaign, but I think there are serious methodology problems that may render the whole campaign unethical, if not illegal. Moonfruit is claiming that any tweet with #moonfruit in it is considered an entry to the contest, yet there is a widespread problem with Twitter’s indexing of tweets, which results in unknown numbers of people’s tweets not showing up in the public timeline or hashtag threads (and therefore, presumably not becoming part of the pool that Moonfruit draws its winners from).

Repeated efforts to get a response from Moonfruit on this have been (moon)fruitless so far. Without any info from them, I’m led to conclude that they must be relying on that faulty search index, and are simply trying to hide from that truth at least until their contest is over.

What they should do is halt the contest until they can ensure all entries are truly being counted, and urge Twitter to fix their tweet indexing so that it captures all the tweets its supposed to. Then, frankly, they should start their contest over with, because the first 5 days have seemingly been unfair to untold thousands of “entrants”.

Here’s hoping that web journalists stopped being so busy getting wowed by Moonfruit’s success, and start asking whether thousands of people are being unethically used to promote a brand based on a false incentive.

By: SEO-Doctor

SEO-Doctor — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:52:35 +0000

Well done moonfruit, I love this company and their product. Even my holding page is moonfruit…

By: trekker

trekker — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:05:02 +0000

As an old marketer and merchandiser all I can say is its just plain smart. As was previously pointed out in so many words there are many levels to any marketing effort and many ways to measure the success of the effort. At the end of the day those decisions will be made by the people at Moonfruit. I say, good show

By: Lyndoman

Lyndoman — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:32:23 +0000

@craig Yes it’s amazing how many people are mentioning Moonfruit in tweets. It’s not spam, it’s buzz.

By: Craig Broadbent

Craig Broadbent — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:13:22 +0000

a good idea that’s obviously worked very well for them, but isn’t this a bit spammy? the noise to signal ratio for tweets with a #moonfruit hashtag is pretty high…

By: Andrew Burnett

Andrew Burnett — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:06:42 +0000

The brand exposure and backlinks alone would make it more than worth it.

Is it cheap? No.

Is it cheaper than ranking for macbook pro through less efficient linkbuilding? Definitely.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=macbook+pro

By: Bill Hartzer

Bill Hartzer — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:18:36 +0000

I have to admit, I hadn’t heard of moonfruit until they started their twitter campaign. Great campaign, they’ll certainly get their money’s worth.

By: Lyndoman

Lyndoman — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:44:53 +0000

@alex

If you want to know the answer, simply count the number of #moonfruit tweets in a 24 hour period, there are tools which do that. It’s not hard to do

But I would rather focus on the seo and buzz marketing aspects of the campaign and its success rather than the probability factor of winning the prize

A few people have made comments that such a thing is expensive, it’s not at all. But it’s certainly not straight forward to someone to think up and implement.

You have to have guts to do something like this as there is always a possibility that it could flop. But if a buzz marketing campaign flops, and no one sees, did it really happen?

My thinking is, it’s expensive not to try stuff like this.

By: alex borsody

alex borsody — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:29:27 +0000

so many people are doing this what are the chances of getting a macbook, 10 in a million?

By: kelvin newman

kelvin newman — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:17:55 +0000

perfectly executed, a domain name company name cheap did something similar a while back that worked really well too!

By: Sam Hauglustaine

Sam Hauglustaine — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:27:50 +0000

I guess they currently experience success has its price… Site unreachable.