Online advertising service Chitika is risking the wrath of the Twitter community by launching a competition that encourages its users to tweet the same daily message to its followers in order to gain credits for a new competition.
The upcoming SearchAppalooza competition will be held at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in New York on 24th March, where five finalists will present their search applications to a board of judges including those from Microsoft and Yahoo!
That competition is all well and good, but the issue is with how Chitika is encouraging the word to be spread. For the chance to win an Amazon Kindle 2, Twitter users should tweet the following, verbatim:
Chitika contest: Best Search App of 09. 5 Winners present to MS/Yahoo execs and @jenstar! #searchAppalooza http://snurl.com/d6l3h
Each day this is tweeted, the user receives another contest entry.
I’ve already seen this once, and I expect I’ll see it a lot more. I don’t have a problem with people promoting competitions, but it would have been better if Chitika picked the most creative tweet, or allowed some form of variation, because for the next x days (I don’t know when the closing date is, but potentially it’ll last for two weeks) these identical tweets are going to flood the service.
At least, if this takes off, they will. I’m keeping a count. How many will you have spotted by 24th March, and what do you think of this kind of competition?
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