Formspring's Marketing Moment Comes With Its First Promoted Question Of The Day

Erick Schonfeld

Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the executive producer of DEMO. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City. Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily... → Learn More

Monday, July 11th, 2011
Formspring ape Q

Social Q&A site Formspring, where more than 3 billion questions have been answered so far, had a marketing moment today. For the first time, the Question of the Day was a promoted question: “What do you think would happen if apes took over? #apeswillrise”

The question promotes the upcoming movie Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, which is the prequel to the classic Planet Of The Apes hence the #apeswillrise hashtag). The question has been answered more than 76,000 times, which is a decent level of engagement for a one-day campaign. (You can see my answer above). It is on track to beat yesterday’s non-sponsored Question of the Day, which garnered 148,000 answers.

This is not the first brand campaign on Formspring, but it is the first promoted Question of the Day. Formspring uses the Question of the Day to keep up overal engagement with its users. Formspring is a service where people ask each other questions and spread those questions on Facebook and Twitter. It is close to hitting 3.5 billion answers, and now has 25 million registered users.

Company: Formspring
Website: formspring.me
Launch Date: November 25, 2009
Funding: $14M

Formspring helps people find out more about each other by sharing interesting & personal responses. It starts by directly asking people original questions in anticipation of their entertaining or revealing responses. Responses can range from straightforward to surprising, and can lead to understanding and learning more about other people.

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