A Twitter competition done right

I woke up this morning in bad mood. A really bad mood. One of those “look at me the wrong way and I’ll bite your head off” moods. So it was a very nice surprise to open up my twitter and find that I had won something.
“How and What?!” I hear you shouting eagerly. Well, a couple of days ago I noticed an influx of tweets on my feed with the hash tag: #2020tweets. Intrigued, I clicked the tag (as you do) and found that it’s for a campaign Orange are running from their @OrangeTheFeed account. The premise is simple, tweet something that you’d like to be tweeting in the year 2020, and Orange will choose a few of the best to win something as a “kick-start towards making their future-dreams come true”.

Never one to shy away from a trending hashtag, I went ahead and added my own ‘future dream’, and as you can see below Orange thought it was inspired enough to win a little something:

Now I know the idea of a twitter competition isn’t something new, but I think this stands as a firm example of it done right. It doesn’t have a long list of complicated rules, and they’re not asking people to spam their followers with endless links or try and get x amount of retweets. Quite simply, they’re asking people to talk about themselves, and a handy by-product of that chatter just so happens to be those same people talking about and promoting Orange.
When Orange contacted me to let me know I had won, not only did I retweet that to my followers, I also took it over to my facebook to share it with my friends and non-tweeters there, and here I am writing up a blog about them too. Word of mouth in action.
And don’t forget that a positive impression isn’t limited to a social media platform, it transcends into the real world too, and for me personally comes at a time when I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with my current provider and its uninventive top-up surprises.

Update (18/03/11)
I DM’d Orange (thats a direct message for you non-tweeters) yesterday and asked them if they wouldn’t mind giving me a few moments of their time and few words about the idea behind the competition.

Martin from Poke (the creative agency that run The Feed for Orange) said:
“Twitter is usually all about what you’re doing right now. But, we reckoned, what about using it to talk about what you want to be doing? We thought #2020Tweets would be a nice way to invite people to think about their aspirations for the not-so-far-off future, and to give them a bit of a nudge towards making it happen.”

And when I asked Emily (also at Poke) why they chose to go with a hashtag as opposed to a RT she answered:
“We always use hastags on our weekly posts. One of Orange’s main objectives is to create conversations, so hashtags are a nice natural way helping to start those.”

Clever people with a real and authentic approach to social media. Well done Orange, and well done Poke! I am now officially a convert, and will be bringing my custom to Orange as soon as I can find find a contract (and new smartphone) that suits me. That’s not a hint, honest 😉