TwitterMeThis.com - Leveraging Twitter for Marketing

TwitterMeThis is a Twitter marketing experiment proposed by Jim Kukral a blogger who writes about online marketing, blogs, tech, and making money online. The premise is pretty simple. Each day Kukral will post a question on Twitter, whoever answers it first gets five bucks via Paypal. Kukral wants to find out how many followers he can get without any marketing budget. So far, he’s managed to get about 300 followers in the space of two weeks. Basically, Kukral has found a potentially successful means for harnessing Twitter for marketing and community building. Marketers could push across information through interaction; and Twitter easily facilitates buzz, thus giving viral marketers an easy target. So far, Krukal isn’t planning to do anything with his experiment, but it will be interesting to see just where it leads.

“1. Follow Twitter.com/Twittermethis
2. Every so often, at a random time, we'll ask a random question via Twitter. (Example: Twittermethis: When was Google launched?)
3. Be the first to respond to @twittermethis with the correct answer and you win $5.00, *paid immediately via PayPal (must have valid PP addy).
That's it. What, you don't like free money?”

This could potentially be huge for marketers. This pushing of information is what Twitter is especially good at. Plus Krukal’s experiment adds in that layer of interaction which gets users involved, pumped as it were. They begin to feel an affiliation, they enjoy the questions (an the money). Adverts could easily be implemented.

Is using Twitter as a marketing platform such a good idea? Will Twitter users find it devious?