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Wednesday, September 16 2009

Moonfruit twitter campaign wrap up – creative responses under reported

By Joe on Wednesday, September 16 2009, 11:02

Before we launch into a new season of exciting product releases (really watch this space for a radical overhaul!) and new fun and games. We thought we’d reflect on what a crazy summer it’s been. The Twitter campaign we ran in early July sparked a huge amount of interest across the globe with over 200 blogs and articles written in everything from the Wall Street Journal, FT and Forbes magazine in the traditional press through to Techcrunch and Mashable leading the way online.

It has also been interesting to see the varied responses from different parts of the world. For example the US press were much more positive about the campaign, while the UK press focused more on the controversy and ethics of the campaign.

But what was interesting was that few articles really picked up on all the creative entries and enormous amount of time, love, humor and fun participants generated during the campaign. This was obvious in a conference we spoke at last week about marketing on Twitter where many of the experts and delegates told us there were totally unaware of the creative part of the campaign and felt it had been under reported.

For us this was the most exciting and rewarding part of the campaign, where we got to really engage with the Twitterverse and see your playfulness and good humour come out in bizarre and wonderful interpretations of our brand. With over 500,000 tweets, 3000+ images, 500+ videos, and many songs, poems and even crochets birds created by you during these 7 days, this really made the campaign what it was.

We are grateful to all participants, new subscriptions increased by 20% during the summer so we must be doing something you like! We will continue to ensure we keep innovating, provide good service and add a little humour and creativity to everything we do.

So for all of those that missed it, we thought we’d summarise these wonderful contributions one more time. This is by no means exhaustive, but gives a good taste of what was done.

CREATIVE COMPETITION PICTURES

Just a few (hundred) of the many awesome pictures you guys sent in, THANKYOU!

www.flickr.com/photos/40593155@N08/sets/72157621912820609

OUR FAVOURITE 30 CREATIVE WEBSITES

www.flickr.com/photos/40593155@N08/sets/72157621596748144

YOUTUBE VIDEOS

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=moonfruit

SUMMARY ‘THANK YOU’ MONTAGE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUjtor3Ozhc

So there you have it. We’re still beavering away on new product features and a radical overhual of the Moonfruit tools, to be released next month. And maybe, just maybe we may call on you again with some Twitter based madness…

3 comments

Monday, July 6 2009

Twitter censors Moonfruit? What does it mean for the future of Twitocracy?

By Wendy on Monday, July 6 2009, 15:08

Moonfruit
Twitter censors
Website builer

Late Friday night 3rd July, around midnight UK time Moonfruit finally tumbled off the top of the trends list on Twitter. Now this wasn’t wholly unexpected with July 4th on the way and the resignation of Sarah Palin. But what was odd is how it that it never returned despite the stats being above other trending topics. If you compare Moonfruit vs Wimbledon in terms of share of tweets (see graph below), you can see Moonfruit has ranked higher at all times except the Men’s final. But Wimbledon has been a trending topic several times over the weekend. I’ve also included data for Serena and Venus which have also been on the top trends list.

http://twist.flaptor.com/?span=168&gram=moonfruit%2Cwimbledon%2Cserena%2Cvenus

There is further data available at http://hashtags.org/ which shows popular hashtag topics. So on balance it looks like the Moonfruit tag has been removed from the trends list by Twitter.

We also sent an email to Twitter on Saturday asking them about this, but have yet to get a reply. It may be because it’s been the 4th July weekend, so we’ll wait and see but given the profile of this story and the furore in the twittersphere we would expect them to respond?

What does this mean?

Ok, first things first. When we started this we wanted to create a buzz there’s no doubt about that. But we didn’t expect the campaign to become so large. And believe it or not, we didn’t want to dominate Twitter for 10 days, or push important subjects like Iran off the agenda.

But given how it has turned out we are also touched by how people have responded to the brand and campaign. We love how they’ve questioned it, played with it, joked about it, sung about it, painted it, made it out of fruit, shouted at it and made it what it is through their participation. We are in awe of the brilliance and creativity of the Twittersphere. So thank you all.

However, we also recognise that the campaign sets a dangerous precedent and could have implications for how Twitter is used and abused by marketers. This is a subject much commented on (see Mashable, Techcrunch, BBC), etc.

So if Twitter had come to us and said, “guys, enough is enough”, then we would have worked with them to limit the campaign, or complied with whatever they were demanding. However, if they have pulled the trending without explanation or communication, this sets rather a different tone.

Not to be misinterpreted, it’s certainly their right to protect their network and technology investment. (And incidentally, I think taking us off the trends at this point is the right thing for Twitter, and I’m happy with that response). But as a company that strives to provide a real time, democratic communication platform, we don’t believe taking action quietly behind the scenes is the right answer, not exactly transparent. Particularly given the numbers of press, marketers, businesses and consumers on twitter following this campaign right now.

I’ve said it before in comments on other blogs, but this is probably a commercial channel for Twitter in the future (I’m sure they’ve thought about it! Maybe we’ve touched a nerve.) Perhaps there should be ‘commercial trends’ vs ‘normal trends’ lists. And its certainly been said that users should be able to filter their feeds to remove ‘commercial’ or unwanted tags.

What would help me is a clear understanding of what happened, and therefore what the new ‘rules of the game’ are going forward. What does this mean for topics on Twitter? What does it mean for marketers? If we were removed as ‘spam’, when did we become spam, was it ok for the first few days, just not after? And are the creative responses, videos, images, songs, etc. all just spam? (see ‘Real people get creative with Moonfruit’).

Two oil paintings of Moonfruit? A woman paper-maching her face to look like a moon (while eating fruit)? A ransom letter to Moonfruit demanding a Mac? A man making his lunch zuchinni into the words ‘Moonfruit’? Writing songs and penning Haiku’s? Teenagers dancing and producing films? Is this spam?

Maybe there’s no right answer, ultimately only what the twitter crowd agree. Perhaps if they had been given a bit longer they would have decided for themselves. That’s the intention surely of ‘follow’ and ‘unfollow’.

What does the Twitterverse think?

Twitter, what happened?

Important Update – Big Bang Finale!

The competition response has been crazy and wonderful. Thank you all. But to bring the mayhem to a close and remain respectful to the Twitterverse, we’ve decided to bring forward the end date from Friday 10th July to Tuesday 7th July (e.g. this week).
This means all remaining Macbook Pros will be given away on this last day. Still 10 Macbooks, just in 7 days not 10. So there will be 4 winners on Tuesday for Macbook prizes 7, 8, 9 and 10. All will be randomly picked from the last 24 hour of tweets.

We’ll still take creative entries for discretionary prizes, so send them to us @moontweet.

And we’re looking at how we can have an ongoing competition for our customers who built the best new sites each month.

Once again, thank you all for your input, creativity, love and humour (and humor ;-). Best of luck!!

Wendy Tan White

67 comments

Saturday, July 4 2009

Real people get creative with #moonfruit

By Joe on Saturday, July 4 2009, 22:24

Creative entry
Moonfruit
Twitter
Website builder

Well we never expected this! Songs, pictures, stories – all about Moonfruit. This crazy thing is getting out of control! We love the things you’re doing. You guys have turned this Twitter campaign into a Creative Moonfruit Movement.

NB: Will add as fast as we can. We are using the searches below and a database of tweets to look at entries. Please add to this blog if you think your entries are missing. Thankyou!

Creative responses on YouTube
Creative responses on Flickr
Our ‘Thank You’ compilation of responses

Here’s selection of some we’ve picked up, sorry we haven’t got to everyone yet there are so many:

@sutuma http://bit.ly/Z6IoR (first winner)

@tear96 http://bit.ly/19snmq (2nd winner)

@chadwelch http://bit.ly/w73zF (3rd winner)

@bramketting #Moonfruit didn’t comply to my demands so I set the bird free: http://pic.gd/de8f5 It’s over: http://bit.ly/1VxxCh (4th winner)

@Felorah http://bit.ly/tKZVX (robot cartoon animation)

@awessendorf http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vckPscOt7Y (cartoon song)

@usebombs http://twitpic.com/9695y (Moonfruit picture quiz)

@topitzman http://bit.ly/krfq6 cool Moonfruit song

@pauldz http://twitpic.com/947yr (moonfruit comic strip)

@ChosenPredator http://bit.ly/VqI8O (moonfruit puppet story)

@sloorp http://bit.ly/143TzF (moonfruit animated story)

@MasterWayne http://twitpic.com/975wm (mathematical fruit)

@eagleascent http://bit.ly/ir3UE (US kid talks to himself)

@pauldz http://bit.ly/UqJSF (picture story)

@fabulouscess http://bit.ly/U1XMa (two sisters singing)

@JorjLim http://bit.ly/17mJNI (so bad it’s great)

@aurelienlewin http://twitpic.com/94r44 (radio active moonfruit)

@tgundred http://twitpic.com/991n9 (apple moonfruit)

@kelsiwaslike http://twitpic.com/992ja (another apple moonfruit)

@mayasud http://twitpic.com/994c4 (nice picture nursery rhyme)

@essexgourmet http://twitpic.com/9dzms

@rockstarsharks http://bit.ly/bc4uT (video shows real dedication!)

@lintster http://twitpic.com/9p1sp (cute illustration]

@yashiyama http://twitpic.com/9ff4q (adorable!)

And there’s more to come. If you’ve seen some that you think are great post them here too. Enjoy!

231 comments

Thursday, July 2 2009

Holy Twitter Batman – the campaign response

By Joe on Thursday, July 2 2009, 12:45

Many of you will have noticed our twitter campaign that started on Tuesday to give away 10 Macbook Pros to celebrate the 10th Birthday of Moonfruit. Yes we’re that old ;-). But I don’t think any of us expected it to go quite so crazy.

We’ve been trending at the number 1 spot on twitter for the last 36 hours or more, our number of followers is approaching 20,000 before the end of the first 48 hours and our site traffic has increased by 8 times or more. Ouch.

Mashable (The Social Media Guide) has written this up as ‘A Twitter campaign done right’ and an SEO expert calls us bigger than Michael Jackson. And Brand Republic calls it a massive success.

At around midnight last night 300 tweets per minute were about moonfruit and this accounted for 1.63% of all twitter traffic. And including the Mashable article that was also trending about Moonfruit it was around 2.85% in total.

http://twist.flaptor.com/trends?gram=moonfruit&span=24

Interesting times. We’re looking forward to seeing what happens…

26 comments

Thursday, June 4 2009

http://twist.flaptor.com/trends?gram=moonfruit&span=24

Interesting times. We’re looking forward to seeing what happens…

26 comments

Thursday, June 4 2009

Moonfruit SME SEO article

By Joe on Monday, January 26 2009, 15:52

Press
SEO
SME

Yes I know that’s too many acronyms, but hey, sometimes it happens. Being regular moonfruitlougers, it’s probably nothing you don’t know, but thought it might still be worth a read. Here you go;

http://www.smallbizpod.co.uk/sevens/2009/01/7-practical-tips-on-marketing-your-small-business-website/

We were also selected as website of the day by these guys!

http://m.pocket-lint.co.uk/news/news.phtml/20671/21695/design-build-host-great-websites.phtml

2 comments

Wednesday, May 2 2007

Telegraph article – my best deal

By Joe on Wednesday, May 2 2007, 17:50

Yes, it does happen sometimes. Here’s an interview in the Telegraph with yours truely about a deal we did with Channel 4. I forgot to mention it at the time (was on holiday).

6 comments

Friday, March 2 2007

Moonfruit review – Web User

By Joe on Friday, March 2 2007, 17:58

We were reviewed by Web User and given 5 stars and their Silver Award.

We didn’t want the gold award obviously, we’d have nothing to aim for 😉

one comment

Thursday, March 1 2007

Moonfruit review – PC Mag in the US

By Joe on Thursday, March 1 2007, 18:01

“Without a doubt, Moonfruit is the slickest of these online site buidlers” PC Mag USA. Damn right. Check on the full review.

no comment

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