There are two brands that have been getting a lot of buzz lately, the Twitter brand and the iPhone brand, and when you put them together and use Twitter to promote traffic to your twitter feeds, it can be a very powerful thing.
There is a web hosting company called Squarespace who is doing an iPhone giveaway via Twitter.
They started giving away 30 iPhones in 30 days on June 8th, 2009
It is a very simple contest, all you need to do is send out a tweet with the #squarespace hashtag included and they will randomly choose one (1) winner per day who will get a brand new iPhone 3GS. (In this case a $199.00 apple gift card that will help you buy a new iPhone 3GS, you will still have to sign up for AT&T two year committment account).
Now the catch is that users must enter a daily tweet every single day (with #squarespace in the tweets) for a new chance to win as they clearly explain on their blog.
They are announcing the winners via their website and via their Twitter @squarespace feed.
There is a lot of great positive buzz on twitter about this promotion
Now even though this is in concept a great idea, it can also generate some negative buzz by creating a lot of noise overload, especially for those Twitter users who follow a lot of people and can start to turn people off.
I agree with some social media pundits who have been saying that we need to think of a contest or a promotion that encourages people to deliver some value, so, in order not to turn a good idea into a social media promotion failure, we need to make sure that 1) We engage the users, 2) We ask for some substance and affiliation with our brand, 3) Run the contest in a short time (ie, 7 days or so); that will make your promotion interactive and not just pushing out noise.
