Tag Archives: Twitter

I’m sure I’m not the only person to think of this, but what if advertisers went back to giving away prizes to the ‘10,000th customer’, only the prize would go to the person who mentions the product in the 10,000th tweet.

For example, let’s say Pepsi is the product. Pepsi Co. makes it known that the person responsible for the 1,000,000th tweet that contains the hashtag #Pepsi will win $100,000 bucks (or whatever prize is adequate motivation). Then they sit back and watch as people work their product into tweets. If CNN picks this up as a story and then Ashton Kutcher mocks it or whatever, that’s over a million people who’ve just seen the word Pepsi. Some of those people then pick it up and actually type the word Pepsi. If I want to remember something, I have to write it down. Surely, getting people to type the name of your product offers a substantial boost to the product’s retention or stickiness or whatever term’s used in marketing jargon.

Shoot, a Pepsi sounds pretty good right about now.

This isn’t exactly monetizing Twitter, which I’m told is what everyone’s trying to figure out, but it’s using the community to willingly advertise for you in an organic way.

I’ve finally opened a Twitter account, so you can follow me at http://twitter.com/ardamis. As a social experiment, it’s interesting to watch and discuss, but I haven’t really participated much. On the other hand, I’m very interested in the phenomenon of URL shortening. So, without too much trouble, I put together yet another URL shortening service: Minifi.de (‘minified’, in the jargon). It does pretty much the same thing as tinyurl.com, bit.ly and is.gd – you enter a long URL and it returns a shorter one. I’m about 50% done with the API (it works, so long as the URL valid), so if anyone knows of any clients that allow the user to specify a shortening service, I’d like to test that functionality. I have plans to make it account-based, so that you can track usage statistics and such, but that will only happen after I’m confident that the thing will survive in the wild.

So, feel free to give it a whirl, but know that it’s still in development and that I’ll probably have to wipe the database a few more times before I get it just right.