Posted At : July 7, 2009 3:08 PM | Posted By : Judette
Related Categories: Social Media

What’s Moonfruit?

If you’re in Twitterverse the question would have crossed your mind more than a couple of times per day this week as tweet after tweet ended with the hash tag #moonfruit, making it the number one trending topic in Twitter last week eclipsing (on the social media platform) the Michael Jackson story, Wimbledon and even the Obamas’ in Russia.

So what’s Moonfruit?

Turns out that that it is not at all exotic as it sounds. The company with the funny name is in fact 10-year old web design company. Yes, that’s it. Nothing exotic about it, right? But how Moonfruit managed to become the top trending topic on Twitter (a fairly accurate barometer of what the world is talking about) is due to a clever marketing campaign that was so simple and effective, one wonders how some other corporate giant didn’t beat them to it at first.

Ok to the campaign.

Someone in the Moonfruit marketing department decided to run a 'competition' to celebrate a corporate milestone. The rules were simple. All you had to do was to include #moonfruit in your postings on Twitter and you would be entered into a random draw. The prize, spread across a 10 day period, would be 10 Macbook Pros. The company’s marketers didn’t require that tweeters have a commercial message involving MoonFruit, all that posters had to do was to tweet and at the end, include the hashtag.

There was a rush to respond. With 400 tweets per minute including the specified hash tag, Moonfruit (and many others) declared it the most successful campaign on Twitter.

Not everyone agrees.

“Is this spam?” queried some in blogsphere. A clever gimmick wrapped up in the niceties of social media but in the final analysis just messages going to people who never wanted or asked for them in the first place. It deserves a second of consideration, but only a second, because isn’t that what the billion dollar advertising industry is built upon? I know. Social media is supposed to be different but I think that people are spreading the Moonfruit hashtags quiet voluntarily, going with the wisdom of the crowd, knowing that in doing so they are defining some new boundaries for how messages spread.

I think the results of the campaign speak for themselves. With over 200,000 postings per day no one on a social media platform will be able to think of web development without thinking of Moonfruit. Visits to the site executives claim are up by 600%. With such claims, I think its just a matter of time before other companies don’t jump on Twitter with a ‘fruity’ marketing campaigns of their own.

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for the past few days I have been thinking of social media campaign for my organization and I must say this was a great one. Good job to those who thought of it. Fantastic way to drive traffic to one;s site and in the web world... traffic is money. Hopefully my idea would be just as effective.

# Posted By maxie | 7/8/09 9:38 PM

The Moonfruit campaign was brilliant because it was a first and the only time an organisation was using the hashtag tactic with such brilliant results.

I think though if Twitter becomes too commercialized, if it is used to push too many organisational messages it may alienate the very folks who made the social media platform a success.

Would love to know how your campaign evolves though. Please keep in touch

# Posted By Judette Coward Puglisi | 7/9/09 12:26 PM

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5am At Mango Media Caribbean

Mango Media Caribbean

Moonfruit and an electrifying Twitter campaign set new boundaries for marketers