Saturday, April 11, 2009

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been running a test campaign with Be-A-Magpie.  Using my own Twitter account, which has approximately 1700 followers, I’ve been allowing Be-A-Magpie to insert advertisements into my feed every 10 tweets. For every 10 updates I do, Be-A-Magpie gets to place an ad. My goal was to learn whether my followers would click through on the links in those advertisements.  If they did, I reasoned, then Be-A-Magpie might be a viable way for us to promote Calliflower conference calls, and Calliflower conference call services.  

I was reasonably careful to make sure that the advertisements that Be-A-Magpie put into my twitter stream were appropriate to my followers — not inconsistent with what I might write about, and no products or services that I definitely wouldn’t endorse.  I also labelled the advertisement with the words “advert:” before each one.

The results?  Dreadful.  

• Not a single click, and therefore no money earned.  
• Several individuals said derisive things about the service, and by extension me. 

My conclusion?  Conversational marketing via Twitter definitely works.  I can see the click throughs on any tweet I put out and track via bit.ly.  Be-A-Magpie, however, looks to be a little too contrived for most users to act on the message.  

10 minutes ago I deleted my account.  I’m a Magpie no more.  

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