whydowork.com
Another lesson, any idiot will re-tweet about a free ipod.
For those struggling for ideas, you could build a "has this prize expired site, tracking these very RTs".
A lesson learnt which they failed to mention is increase the time of your competition to greater than 16days ( or whatever it was originally )
That said, for people who are not pushing competition and are using Twitter and RT's to generate leads or help users find content from them. It gives a slight indication that many many trickles might not be harmful to you. ( Well thats at least what I have come away with. )
From this I got the idea of measurement in "wave" and then the obvious "wavelength" jumped into my head and it stuck for me. Now that I have taken a sleep, I quite like "wave energy" too.
> It was a "Jump to Conclusions" mat. You see, it would be this mat that you would put on the floor... and would have different CONCLUSIONS written on it that you could JUMP TO.
I used to think Twitter was useless because I missed the point. Twitter is a simple messaging system, but the real value is in the communication culture that Twitter users created providing a "network of humans" that was not possible to build in an efficient way before twitter.
The development of this new communication model was somewhat spontaneous I think but because there were two very important features in the system: non-reciprocal following and short messages.
You have a lot of people tweeting about your prize and leading people to your company. Isn't there some way you could reward these people for sending the free PR? A second prize that's smaller, but in "thanks"?
Instead, his idea was to write a blog about all these darn idiots tweeting about his company. Way to go.
This assertion is easier to agree with, although I think it's generally a PEBKAC problem (on the community level) and not a problem with twitter as a tool per se, except insofar as it attracts people with 140-character attention spans.
In my opinion this sort of use (publicity seeking via encouraging retweets by offering a prize) is an abuse of the system. I hope it crashes and burns and dies. This sort of use pattern comes from looking at twitter through the lens of old media. "How can we get our brand out in front of lots of eyeballs?" "How can we artificially create brand recognition?"
You may be able to abuse twitter to get your brand seen by more people than you could reach with a superbowl ad at much less cost, but that doesn't mean you should, or that that's helpful. It's much better to use twitter as a means to interact honestly and directly with your customers. People retweeting about some lame-ass contest will get your brand as much negative attention as positive (if not more). People organically retweeting about positive experiences with your company will be far more valuable.
In short, don't spend your time pushing your brand on the public, spend your time making something awesome that people love, providing top quality service, and showing the world you are a company of real, honest people who believe in their product and care about their customers rather than a bunch of faceless attention seeking drones.
Option #1: add "(ends Nov 1)" to the tweet.
Option #2: be cool, roll with the publicity - "We've had such a great response that we've decided to have two prizes. Thanks for the support!"
Basically, the guy didn't just not know how to use twitter, but he doesn't know how to run a contest, or probably how to run a legal contest.
Surely, there are more important stories out there.
For other people, the masses don't care.