Moonfruit, a U.K.-based company that offers free Web site building tools, saw a great opportunity to raise brand awareness on Twitter. The company last week kicked off a sweepstakes, giving away 10 MacBook Pro computers to Twitter users that include the #moonfruit tag in their tweets. (The sweepstakes ended on July 7.)

The campaign worked, maybe too well. The hashtag #moonfruit was Twitter’s top trending topic for several days, with more than 250 tweets a minute. According to the site builder, at its peak Moonfruit represented 2.5% of all Twitter traffic, beating topics like Michael Jackson, Iran and Wimbledon. Twitters also created posters (pictured above) and a Moonfruit song, which helped shape the campaign, said Wendy Tan White, Moonfruit’s founder.

Then it was suddenly over. Late last Friday, Moonfruit dropped from the top of the trends list and never returned. According to the company’s stats, however, Moonfruit was still emerging above other trending topics. White said Twitter seems to have removed Moonfruit from the trend’s list. Twitter could not be reached for comment at press time. But according to Moonfruit’s blog, “the campaign sets a dangerous precedent and could have implications for how Twitter is used and abused by marketers . . . it’s certainly their right to protect their network and technology investment.” What left Moonfruit puzzled is why it was censored without explanation.

Ben McConnell, co-founder of the Society for Word of Mouth (an educational network for word of mouth efforts) and co-writer of the Church of the Customer blog, said Twitter might have been annoyed by the attention Moonfruit was consuming, or simply tired of the topic. “There’s not a big basket of marketing campaigns successfully launched via Twitter because, people being people, there’s a natural resistance to being a receptacle for marketing messages,” McConnell added. “Plus, there’s no formula for creating consistent viral success.”

In offering advice to other marketers launching similar campaigns via Twitter, White said it’s important to “keep on your toes” as things can change very rapidly. “The difference between this and a normal campaign is that it is an ongoing conversation,” said White. “This means messages can evolve over the period, but it also means you have to stay on top of it and react fast.”

There is another lesson to be learned here for marketers. “The Moonfruit story is a great example of money versus gold,” said McConnell. “Give away money and people will question your motives or yawn in boredom. Give away gold, in this case MacBook Pros, and they’ll line up for blocks.”

via [Elena Malykhina@brandweek.com]

Yet despite its spam woes, Twitter has somehow avoided an overflow of content from one of the Internet’s biggest industries: porn. Well, until recently that is. An interesting article in MediaPost describes both marketers and Twitter users noticing an increase in pr0n-related spam, and they are not liking it. The issue makes us wonder: should Twitter stamp out pornography; and how should they go about it?

Twitter Users’ Feedback on Pornography

The MediaPost piece essentially quotes some of Twitter’s active marketers on the issue of Twitter and porn. What they have to say, though, is not pretty at all. While you can guess how users react in the piece, Ben Smith of MerchantCircle sums up the problem best:

MerchantCircle has begun to offer a portfolio of local city-specific coupons via Twitter feeds. “As we have found with any new communication form, pornography and other types of issues creep in,” says Ben Smith, MerchantCircle CEO. “The problem with this type of activity is that it undermines the trust in the communication channel, which will have a disastrous effect on the channel.”

Has pornography taken over Twitter? No, not by a longshot. Is it a growing problem? Absolutely. Things like Twitter porn trojans make it clear that Twitter is not impervious to porn-related spam and malware.

What Do Twitter’s Terms of Service Say?

We took a look at the Twitter Terms of Service, which governs user interactions with the Twitter platform. While it mentions that they can “remove Content and accounts containing Content that we determine … are obscene or otherwise objectionable,” it makes no specific reference to pornography.

Compare this to the terms of service of other social media companies, such as the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which specifically states the following:

6. You will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.

Does this mean that Twitter doesn’t care about porn? Absolutely not – Twitter has addressed pornography spam in the past and we doubt that it would let the Internet’s underground industry tarnish its strong reputation.

And yet Twitter needs to monitor the situation. Porn should not be acceptable on Twitter, especially an open platform that millions of companies and users use for business and marketing every single day. It may be a relatively small issue now, but it will grow more prevalent unless they put a stop to the problem early. It’s easy to forget just how much of the Internet is entirely porn.

First though, Twitter needs to build a search spam solution ASAP. It’s all part of the same core problem that Twitter will need to address.

Tags: porn, pornography, twitter

The plane, en route to Santa Monica Airport, instead touched down at Van Nuys Airport after the pilot reported the smoke coming from the instruments.

Schwarzenegger, who has been TwitPic-ing many of his trips around the state, posted an image of the plane on the runway after the landing, along with the Tweet: “A little adventure just now when my plane made an emergency landing. All’s ok, though.”

Emerging Ecosystem

[via CNN]

Tags: twitter