Morisy.com

Brian Morrissey, an editor at AdWeek and, since I joined the service, one of my favorite Twittering journalists (not to mention his homonymical last name to mine!), tackled shortcut-taking Twitter contests in a blog post of his own last week, and unsurprisingly he does a better job than yours truly, when I wrote about the ethics of Pay-per-Tweet and Twitter contests.

Morrissey pretty quickly outlines how much these somewhat tacky contests can save over traditional marketing campaigns, as well as the potential hidden costs (using as a case study the Squarespace iPhone "giveaway"):

Is this effective? I'm not sure. No matter what, it's pretty low cost -- the 30 phones will cost it under $10,000 with no media or creative costs to speak of. It's clear that Twitter will need to crack down on this kind of hashtag gaming (hello, #spymaster) for people to become trending topics. This kind of thing, to me, quickly becomes spam.

$10,000 for absurd amounts of reach, even if it's low-impact reach, is every advertiser's dream. Having worked at an advertising boutique for a few weeks one winter break, I can tell you those numbers blow billboards, radio, and almost all traditional creative out of the water by such a margin it's not even funny.

But how do you qualify the loss of brand equity associated with annoying customers with such a blatant attention grab? Already, one of Morrissey's readers has posted a Mea Culpa for responding to the hash tag scheme.

Follow Brian Morrissey on Twitter. While you're at it, follow me too; I'm much more letter efficient.

More on social marketing:

• The ethics of Pay-per-tweet, Twitter contests, and word-of-mouth marketing
• The Sinister Sibling of Paid Reviews
• Commercial alert on buzz marketing, another term for social marketing
• Marketers Demand Ad Audits
• BusinessWeek on MTVu's Y2M Acquisition

BostonTweet & @Sayagle are giving away 2 dozen Sweet Cupcakes (2 $36 gift cards)! RT to enter - drawing on 6/4 http://bit.ly/ibCHl

--BostonTweet

Seeing more and more sweepstakes offers on Facebook and MySpace lately, and almost all of these sweepstakes comes with the same "cost": Get a chance at a prize X if, and only if, you log yourself as a loyal follower, friend, or fan, virally spreading on the contest to your RealLife™ friends.

There's nothing wrong with these contests per se, unless you factor in how obnoxious and sort of slimy it is for your friends to try and capitalize on your friendship by begging you to sign up for offer X. I recently started receiving Facebook messages with just such a request, and couldn't help but feeling like ...

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