All posts in Networking

I do a lot of online marketing, I run competitions, I send things out on Twitter and Facebook and I create a buzz online when I can. I also love great campaigns and viral marketing, but there’s a limit when it comes to social platforms such as Twitter, in my opinion.

Afrihost is an Internet Service Provider in South Africa, which offers you all the usual services, such as ADSL and so forth. They’re in the middle of a rebrand and to introduce the new brand, they are running a competition where they are giving away an iPad or something. In order to enter, you have to send a tweet out and include #AfrihostRelaunch in the tweet.

It’s a clever campaign, although not unique, it’s still clever, but hells bells, it’s introduced a whole new meaning to social spam. Think about it, if the people you are all following tweet about this, you’re continually going to receive annoying tweets about Afrihost – Yes, the first couple times is alright, kudo’s to them for relaunching, but when it comes to the 50th time, it starts to get incredibly annoying – receiving tweets is much like receiving emails in my books, the difference is that I don’t want to unfollow (mark as spam) a friend because they wanted to win something.

I sit here longing for the day they launch, just so I don’t have to hear about their bloody relaunch anymore. To be honest, I also feel like they might wreck their new brand, I get the feeling that nobody is really interested in the relaunch, they’re just interested in winning, how many of the people who tweeted using #AfrihostRelaunch have actually followed them?

Check this: The Afrihost twitter account has 930 followers of which only EIGHT of my friends follow them – So out of the hundreds of tweets I’ve read about the relaunch, only 8 actually follow them – that goes to show that people aren’t really interested anyway – talk about a rather crumby ROI.

Anyway, I’m going off on a tangent here, my point was purely that Afrihost have created some gawd awful social spam and I’m definitely not the only one to say this, I’ve done my research. I have nothing against the company, hell, I’ve used their ADSL services before, in fact, I’ve plugged their services right here on iMod, I just don’t take kindly to spam.

If you don’t agree, that’s fine, this is just my opinion. If you do agree, pop a comment below, let’s see how many people we can gather!