Remember viral campaigns? A year or two ago, viral media – videos, sites, or entire campaigns that were so quirky or shocking that friends forwarded them through networks in a viral fashion – was the Holy Grail of the tech marketing world. Now that the viral world has gone mainstream (with some marketing firms even “guaranteeing” a viral smash), the search is on for the next Grail on the web.
Now we’ve found it: the trending topics list on Twitter. Nestled among breaking news topics are a spectrum of memes, games started by celebrity Twitterers, and – you guessed it – ads in the form of giveaways. The most recent participant in the race of trending visibility is an ancient content management company that is giving away free MacBooks to random Twitter users that choose to retweet their company’s hashtag… and they’re putting Twitter’s paid sponsors to shame. TechCrunch reports that the latest stunt is using 2.5% of all Twitter traffic.
Twitter trending is the next wave of guerilla brand promotion online, but its lifetime is sure to be short-lived. If other companies hop on the trending bandwagon, there’s likely to be a competition for the limited space on the trending list; that means that there could be more promotions for bigger prizes down the road. But if the 2.5% spirals up with a flurry of new promotions, Twitter users are bound to tire of seeing sanctioned ads for random companies in the streams of the users they follow.
Where’s the tipping point between entering yourself in a hashtag promotion and becoming a burden for spamming a stream?
