Digital Expression

A Night with the Hottest Girl at Comic-Con. Dinner, Booty & More.

A viral social media marketing campaign by EA has lived up to its name and quickly become an infection that appears will require Electronic Arts (EA) to do some damage control. The nature of the competition which is sexually suggestive, has received  a barrage of negative sentiment fuelled by tribes on Twitter using the #EAFail and #lust hashtags. Some Tweeps suggest that EA has isolated their female market (about 40% of gamers are women:)

malinhanas: Wow. Considering 40% of gamers are women makes this idea even more ridiculous #EAFail #Lust

MelindaShore: still don't understand who thought that giving away a woman like she's an iPod or theatre tickets was a good idea #eafail

And while there have been several male commentators weighing in with negative sentiment, The primary target market for Dante's Inferno, red-blooded teenage males, don't appear to have even raised an eyebrow.

:

Ah c'mon, the average person that goes to comic con is too afraid of booth babes (they might be horny tho) and no sexual harassment will happen. At all

And Tom Gray adds:

EA chose the wrong words in promoting their contest but their audience isn't Gloria Steinem it's socially awkward, 15 year old Conner sitting in the basement with his equally socially awkward friends dreaming of the girls they'll never get - at least until they become the next software/internet/social media gazillionaire.

The Apology

EA have responded to the criticism:

Thanks you for all of your comments and concerns around the Sin to Win Contest at Comic Con. We've responded here: http://twitpic.com/bi18o10:59 AM Jul 25th

We understand there's a lot of debate right now around our "Sin to Win" promotion at Comic-Con and wanted to clarify a few things. We created this promotion as part of our marketing efforts around the circle of Lust (one of the nine sins/circles of Hell). Each month we will be focusing on a new Circle of Hell. This month is Lust. Costumed reps are a tradition at Comic-Con. In the spirit of both the Circle of Lust and Comic-Con, we are encouraging attendees to Tweet photos of themselves with any of the costumed reps at Comic-Con here, find us on Facebook or via e-mail. "Commit acts of lust" is simply a tongue-in-cheek way to say take pictures with costumed reps. Also, a "Night of Lust" means only that the winner will receive a chaperoned VIP night on the town with the Dante's Inferno reps, all expenses paid, as well as other prizes. We apologize for any confusion and offense that resulted from our choice of wording, and want to assure you that we take your concerns and sentiments seriously. We'll continue to follow your comments and please let us know if you have any other thoughts or concerns. Keep watching as the event unfolds and we hope you'll agree that it was all done in the spirit of the good natured fun of Comic-Con.

A Lack of Transparency & Authenticity

• The contest was not restricted to just EA's employees, but extended to any booth babe at comic-con. I wonder if the comic-con organisers knew about and condoned the contest before hand? Furthermore, did the other exhibitors give consent for their employees to be roped into EA's campaign?
• A hoax protest against the game outside Comic-con adds to the inauthenticity of EA's tactics.  Something that could lead one to argue that it is something that is ingrained in their corporate culture.
• In a social media ecosystem that demands transparency and authenticity to survive, their published apology leaves a lot to be desired.

Crisis Response Management

Everything is public. Comments can be picked up and quoted by any publication.This outcome shouldn't have caught them with their pants down and they should have had a crisis response plan in place. The speed of propagation offered by Twitter means that you have to be on your toes and ready to react. Fast. EA should have expected the campaign to be talked about when they chose a social medium like Twitter to run it. They should have known that more than just their primary target market for this game would get wind of it. EA could have:

• Admitted they were wrong, rather than contend that their customers have misinterpreted the situation. The customer is always right.
• Responded to individual tweets and comments to show that they are actually listening to people rather than just saying that they were  in  a blanket statement posted on Twitpic (of all places.) In fact, one critic has made it easy for them and started an archive of  EAFail.

A more transparent apology that addressed these points would have been better, but there's no doubt that the final cut had to go through the legal department for approval first.  They probably should have run the whole campaign past legal and HR first too. Gary Vay Ner Chuck shows us Crisis Management practice: Turning Negatives into Positives

Closing Remarks

• #EAFail will continue to live on in the Twittersphere, being used as a spammer hashtag more than anything else.
• The campaign is very obvious and lacks creativity.  It was done in poor taste and with a lack of proper consideration for using Twitter as a platform to run it.

• The flyer is designed to get the participant's mind racing and fantasizing of what could happen and succeeds.
• #EAFail or #lust never got on Twitter's Top Trends.
• The unofficial The_Sims_3 account seems relatively unaffected, with very little negative sentiment creeping in. However,  it's important to note that the account is not controlled by EA which highlights how easy it is for someone to hijack the brand and run a smear campaign against them.
• A key marketing tenet is to under promise and over deliver.  EA's prize does the exact opposite.

The flyer says:

Front: Dinner and a Sin Ful night with two hot girls, a limo service, paparazzi and a chest full of Booty. Back: A night with the hottest girl at Comic-Con, Dinner, Booty and more.

And then the apology says:

A "Night of Lust" means only that the winner will receive a chaperoned VIP night on the town with the Dante's Inferno reps, all expenses paid, as well as other prizes.

They appear to have insinuated more than what is actually in-store for the winner.

• A relative handful of people are boycotting EA, but most seem to think there has been an over-reaction or are willing to forgive the indiscretion.
• The campaign has not appeared in Twitter's Top Trends list (or on hashtags.org) nor has it made a dent according to Google Insighs.
• In the grand scheme of things, this will blow over within a couple of weeks, but for EA this is a stain on their permanent record and well, some people may just decide not to buy Sims 3.

In contrast, here's a more successful Twitter campaign: Moonfruit:  A Twitter Marketing Campaign Analysis

The response has been beyond belief, far more effective than other marketing channels. We wanted to drive both brand awareness and direct response, but this has achieved both in a far more personal way.

Wendy White, Founder of Moonfruit

Vital Statistics:

Launched Tuesday June 30 2009: 444 followers Ended Tuesday July 7 2009: 44,113 followers Traffic to Moonfruit.com: Increased 600% Sign Ups: Increased 100% A snapshot from the July 4th Techcrunch article shows 2,159,297 vs July 7th:  2,167,375. That's about 2,690 new websites per day (let's assume these are new sign-ups.) Update:  July 8th:  2,170,702. 3327 more signups. Or an increase in sign up rate of:  23% vs. the average sign up rate for the previous 3 days.  This is a good sign for Moonfruit.  While it is still early days, this increase in post campaign activity bodes well for them.

What does Google Say?

Google Insights Top related search terms were: moonfruit and moonfruit twitter. Most regional interest was from the USA, followed by the UK, Canada, Brazil and Germany. Free stuff works.  The trending topics chart probably helped catalyse the Moonfruit campaign together with curiosity about the strange #moonfruit hashtag as evidenced by Google Insights which as of July 7 2009, classifies "What is moonfruit?" as a breakout search term.

Follower Growth

• 20,000 followers and an increase in traffic to Moonfruit.com by 8x (according to moonfruitlounge.com)
• Moonfruit related traffic accounted for 1.63% of all Twitter traffic and spiked to 2.85% following Mashable's Twitter Promotion Done Right #Moonfroot article.
• Overall, the campaign delivered a 600% increase in traffic and doubled sign ups for Moonfruit's easy online website creation product trial.
• Spikes can bee seen that correspond with key influencer blog posts and tweets, as well as a brief appearance in the Twitter hashtag trends list which was removed within 2 days. #squarespace did a similar competition for 30 iphones over 30 days which trended for two days and then vanished. The same has happened to #moonfruit which was on the Top Trends list on Twitter until ~ midnight July 3 UK time. This does not accurately reflective trends of the Twiterverse as is evident from looking at http://hashtags.org/ (see snapshot below)
• It's interesting to note that following @moontweet was not a requirement to entering the competition (although it was suggested ) and yet they've ended up with more than 100X more followers than they started with. One would assume that the number will drop over the coming days.
• But is there real value in obtaining a list of followers who don't really care about what you have to say?  I don't think so, nor do I think it's worth following people in the hopes that they might follow me back or vice versa, which is why after an initial trial run, I stopped using the SocialToo app.

#moonfruit: The Twitter Campaign Details:

• Enter a competition to win a MacBook Pro.  1 given away (anywhere in the world) for 10 days.
• Enter as many times as you like by tweeting #moonfruit and you needed to enter each day's draw separately.

The Moonfruit Homepage encouraged you to tweet:

Celebrate 10 years of Moonfruit and win a MacBook Pro http://bit.ly/96bxC #moonfruit1:44 AM Jul 1st from web

Visitors were also encouraged to follow @moonfruit, so you could learn if you'd won, but this was not a requirement to enter the daily draws. Mid-campaign modifications:

1. Additional prizes of iPods were on offer for the most creative #moonfruit tweet tributes.  This was to reward the participants' creativity and also would have helped maintain a higher standard of Tweet quality.
2. Shortened from 10 laptops over 10 days to 10 laptops over 7 days because of the overwhelming response and increasing backlash over the 'pollution' of the Twitter stream.

Supporting Propagation:

• Most creative #moonfruit tweets displayed on Moonfruit homepage: Profile for the Tweeps.
• Macbook pro winners and #moonfruit creative Tweep profile names displayed and linked on competition homepage.
• Massive coverage by the media (with secondary source like this post adding fuel to the fire)
• Blog posts by moonfruitlounge with good community engagement
• Responsive to community questions @moonfruit

Sentiment Analysis

Knowing how people feel about your brand on social networks, community websites and any other web property that allows for a dialogue.  These include:  message boards, blogs and wikis amongst others.

• Real time sentiment analysis lets you know the views of the people within minutes (and sometimes within moments) of an expression.
• This creates an opportunity to interject and stop negative sentiment from being amplified.  It gives you an opportunity to mitigate the fallout.
• By collating a number of different points of view, you can build a picture of how receptive people are to your brand or how your marketing campaign is performing, and how this changes over time.

Audience Receptivity

• A mostly positive response with moonfruit achieiving a massive amount of attention from the Twitterverse and also news sites including Mashable, Techcrunch, Clickz, BBC and About.com which served to propagate their message further.
• Many users simply added a #moonfruit reference to their regular posts.  The intriguing 'moonfruit' name worked in synergy with the campaign objectives and piked user curiosity to find out more about the company bringing more people into the...let's call it a Tribe (thanks Seth Godin.)

Audience Backlash

• A small % of users considered the campaign nothing more than SPAM and have expressed their discontent (too put things mildly) threatening to unfollow anyone who tweeted #moonfruit.For user perspectives see comments on Moonfruitlounge.com and BBC: Twitter too Corporate by Half

• A quick calculation based on the number of positive vs negative comments posted on some articles written about the #Moonfruit campaign shows that subjectively speaking, 82% have a positive response while 18% have expressed a negative response to the campaign. TEDChris points out that  you have a 1 / 200,000 chance of winning so why bother? Yet, overall, there were more evangelists than complainers.

If knowledge is power, then the company who comes out with the right sentiment analysis algorithm will have unrivaled success (like Google's domination of search.)

Calculating ROI:

10 Macbook Pro's at retail (They probably got a bulk deal) $12,000 5 Ipods: $1500 TOTAL: US$13,500 They grew their Twitter follower base to over 40,000 gained a 6 fold increase in website traffic and most importantly, doubled the rate of sign-ups which should translate into atleast some revenue. Moonfruit did 11 million pounds in sales last year. It will be interesting to see how this campaign impacts their next set of reported results. Initial indications show that Moonfruit may get some sustained value. The sign up rate is not slowing down post-campaign. (up 23%.) Community engagement and brand evangelism:  Many people contributed Moonfruit themed photos and videos in response to an offer of an iPod in exchange for the most creative response. Massive Press coverage (See Google News) on account of the novelty and spectacular scale of the campaign has made Moonfruit a poster child for marketing campaigns on Twitter.

Hijacking:

Some Tweeps have gotten into the bad habit of adding the latest trends hashtags like #moonfruit to their tweets for the sole purpose of getting visibility in search results. These include people advocating social causes which may not be the right way to go about it, and then there are the spammers that are promoting the latest 'Get rich quick' scheme and their affiliate links.

Should we be annoyed?

As Jeremiah Owyang points out, if you don't have an iconic brand with millions of adoring fans, then as a business, you need to exploit whatever means at your disposal to garner attention.  Big brands moving to Twitter create an additional channel to reach their customers, while a smaller business is likely to struggle to expand their share of voice. The problem, however, is that if every company on Twitter starts running a hashtag centric contest, then us Tweeps are in trouble and the Twitterverse will implode.  I'm sure we will see more competitions and the prizes on offer will only get bigger, and everyone has a price. As Sarah Perez puts it:

But while one day that friend is tweeting to win a Macbook, another may be tweeting to win something else. Even if only a small percentage of an ever-shifting group of my friends tweeted a promotional message every day, it would be enough to junk up my timeline.

Perhaps the solution is to limit the scope of competitions? Rather than accepting an unlimited number of entries, it could have been restricted to 1 entry per person per day, or even just one entry for the duration of the competition.  Is it Twitter's responsibility to set guidelines?

Perhaps Tweetboard's launch strategy was the right approach:

You had to tweet a custom message in order to request an alpha invite like so:

Requesting an invite for Tweetboard Alpha (http://tweetboard.com) by @140ware, for my site: http://social-bug.com

Transparent, to the point, and you only ever need to do it once. No subterfuge whatsoever. MTV, Lenovo, Squarespace and Moonfruit were early movers in the # competition arena and gained serendipitous benefits from the novelty of their Twitter initiative in the form of massive press coverage.  As Twitter continues to improve its systems and Tweeps become less tolerant of their streams becoming polluted, future attempts at hashtag competitions will simply be copycat campaigns and will likely see less benefit.

Who's Responsibility is it?

It's clear that anything overtly commercial that causes too much bias will become subject to censorship imposed by Twitter.  Is it justified? Both #squarespace and #moonfruit lost their Twitter trends placements within a couple of days of their campaign launches, which is indicative of Twitter's view on commercial bias. So is it Twitter's responsible to police us? Or is it up to the Twitterverse to police itself?  Darren Stuart suggests that Twitter allow us to block hashtags.  A great solution, and no doubt we will see an application for it in the near future. Twitter might even include spam filters that automatically block Tweets containing hashtags that, for example, have been reported to @spam 100 times.  The original offending Tweep can then also be traced and suspended. Similarly, Tad Chef suggests a simple query: “If hashtag mentions more than 3 times by same user on same day delete from search and don’t count in popularity” Perhaps charging for such campaigns is one way Twitter could monetize and also limit abuse of hashtags. Perhaps a CPM for hashtag views? Or even a sophisticated system that scans a tweet for contextual relevance and gives it an Adwords type quality score which is used to help control what appears in the top trends list? Perhaps a sustainable social marketing approach is better:  Building relationships, adding value and contributing to the conversation and serving the interests of your brand in the long term.

Final Thoughts

What long term value does the large follower base now offer Moonfruit? Will Twitter serve as an effective direct marketing channel like it has for @dellOutlet ?Is it like email where a small percentage of their tweets will lead to sales?  Or will Twitter continue to serve them as a brand building tool? Will they be able to leverage their share of voice in the Twitterverse or will they simply fade away with the end of the campaign?