Campaign or Spampaign?

Right now, on Twitter, the number one trending topic is #moonfruit. I have contributed to this.

Moonfruit are running a twitter campaign. If you tweet the #moonfruit hashtag and the link to the campaign, you can win a MacBook Pro. So far, the campaign has been fairly successful. This isn't entierly new, since Squarespace started a similar campaign in early June.

However, David Whittle decided it was WRONG, and claimed that it will eventually make twitter less useful. Others obviously agree, as he's been widely retweeted.

My initial reaction was definensive (I'd love to have a MacBook Pro), but I'm starting to think he's right.

Much of what I do on twitter involves filtering and scanning tweets to find the informaiton I find useful or interesting. Nevertheless, two or three of these campaigns running consecutively would make twitter very hard to use.

I'm not presuming to tell companies whether or not they should run this type of campaign. I think it's probably too late for that now.

What I'm trying to decide is whether or not to take part in these campaings. I try not to worry about whether or not my tweets will appeal to everyone who follows me. If I did that I'd quickly find myself paralyzed, and I wouldn't use twitter at all.

Nevertheless, I've come to the conclusion that participating in these hashtags campaigns is bad twitter etiquite. This is not because of my tweets might be annoying to some people, but because my tweets add to an accumlated effect that make twitter much less enjoyable for everyone.

In the immortal words of George Castanza: "We're living in a society here!"

I'd be interested to hear what you think. Leave a comment below or reply to me on twitter.