Carsonified

How would you like …

[UPDATE: The deadline has been extended till Monday, March 30th]

1. Your URL to be posted to the ThinkVitamin.com news (93,000+ readers)
2. Me to tweet your URL (8,900+ people)

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Our recent Twitter competition caused quite an uproar. So much in fact, that it made me think that we might’ve made a mistake. After taking time to reflect, I believe the competition was a bad idea. And here’s why.

The concept was simple enough. We’d give people an incentive to tweet a link like this:

“Please retweet this to help me go to http://bit.ly/10Sgh
or http://bit.ly/4w7t (Rules: http://bit.ly/OxIK)”

If they were re-tweeted 20 times, then they would enter a draw to win a free seat to any Carsonified event of their choice.

The problem

We started getting comments from some of you, accusing us of “spamming” Twitter. I really had a tough time understanding where you were coming from. Twitter is an opt-in platform. If you don’t like what you read then stop following that person. Where’s the harm?

The harm isn’t in the one or two tweets that you might receive, the harm is that this kind of marketing strategy could snowball into something that could potentially ruin Twitter. And we don’t want that.

What if Virgin came along and said “If you tweet a link to VirginAtlantic.com, and you get re-tweeted 20 times, you might win a holiday to Hawaii” or if Apple said the same thing, but for a chance to win a shiny new MacBook? I would do it and you probably would as well. Chance to win a free MacBook? Sign me up!

If that happened, Twitter would quickly be filled with meaningless marketing messages and it would become impossible to discern the signal from the noise. Since you can’t filter out certain messages from the people you follow then your only choice is to stop following them, which defeats the whole purpose of Twitter. The experience would be ruined.

Twitter is different

What’s interesting about the negative reaction to our re-tweet competition is that the competition is almost exactly the same as our Golden Ticket competition. The only difference is that we asked people to blog about the Golden Ticket, instead of Tweet about it.

I think there are two reasons why some of you felt spammed by the re-tweet competition:

1. Twitter is perceived as a very personal and non-commercial communication channel. We expect people to be a bit spammy on their blogs - but not on Twitter.

2. Since you are limited to 140 characters, there is no room to explain why you’re re-tweeting something. The entire tweet is taken up with the re-tweet marketing message, with no context or personality. On a blog, you have unlimited space to explain why you’re blogging about something.

Lesson learned!

As I’ve said, I now think the competition was a bad idea. I take full responsibility for it and I’m sorry. I’ve learned we need to wield our Twitter ‘power’ carefully and protect the Twitter experience.

In order to be fair to the people who’ve already entered the competition, we will let the competition finish. However, we won’t be asking people to do anything like this in the future.

Come join us at Carsonispace! I’m really excited to announce that we’ve opened up Carsonified HQ to be a coworking environment where we have five desks available to rent.

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The other day I asked this question on Twitter (twitter.com/ryancarson):

“My sis is looking for an affordable, but fast and reliable backup drive for her Mac. Suggestions? Is Firewire or USB faster these days?”

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[UPDATE]: We’re booked solid till April 1st, 2009. We’ve got a bunch of really exciting projects lined up!

We’ve decided to do a bit of web design, development and consultancy for outside clients in 2009. As the economy is tightening up, we thought it was wise to diversify our revenue streams a bit, just in case.

We constantly get folks asking if we can build sites or apps for them, so I’m really excited to see what will happen. We’re only going to accept a few interesting jobs, so please get in touch right away if you’d like to work together (ryan at carsonified dot com).

Here are the things we can help you out with:

1. Web app/site design and development
2. Web app/site consultancy
3. Small business and start-up consultancy
4. Online marketing consultancy

We’re looking forward to cranking out some beautiful and exciting work! Just shoot me an email at ryan at carsonified dot com or give us a call …

From UK: 01225 324 980
From US or Canada: 011 44 1225 324 980
From Europe: 00 44 1225 324 980

Our meeting room is full of bean bags. We decided to get rid of the tables and swap them out for something more comfortable and relaxing. I can’t tell you how glad I am that we did this.

The problem is that when we interview people for new positions on the Team, we don’t have anywhere to sit. We could go to the local coffee shop, but I specifically choose to do the interviews in the bean bag room.

Why?

There’s nothing that levels the playing field like two people sitting on bean bags. You can’t act ‘professional’ on a bean bag. You can’t use big words and marketing speak. You just have to act like a normal person. I love that.

It’s awkward and funny sitting down and getting up from a bean bag which is great for putting the interviewer (me) on the same level as the interviewee - I’m not the high-and-mighty boss, I’m just a normal person like you. I also like it because it immediately says “we’re not your normal company” to potential Team members.

I’d love to hear any of your tips for interviewing or being interviewed.

The Carsonified team is in central London today for the Future of Mobile, our brand new event. We’re in the BFI MAX theatre, where pioneers of the mobile web are talking to a sell-out crowd of 450 developers, designers, entrepreneurs, marketers and strategists.

Talking at 3pm will be Google’s Dave Burke - he’ll be covering Android and Google’s role in the Open Handset Alliance. It’s the most highly anticipated session of the day, and is being live blogged by Mike Butcher at TechCrunch UK.