Woolworths Goes Web 2.0 For Valentine’s Campaign

Wednesday, 03 February 2010 12:22 Written by Ragel Nel

South African retailer Woolworths has embraced social media for its current Valentine’s Day campaign.

Thanks to a typo on a promotional poster, another local e-tailer has helped the Woolworths campaign to take on even more viral proportions.

The Woolies Love Birds Tweet Your Love campaign is basically a contest playing out online. Participants earn points and stand a chance to win prizes by following and interacting with Woolworths on Twitter and Facebook. The campaign kicked off on the 1st and runs until Valentine’s Day on the 14th of February, but apparently late-comers and their partners (it seems that you have to be coupled up in order to play) can still catch-up and enter.

The campaign took on larger viral proportions when an observant local e-tailer spotted a typo on a promotional in-store poster and hi-jacked the Web site.

When the guys behind local online kitchen gadget shop Yuppiechef (www.yuppiechef.co.za) saw the promotional in-store poster advertising the Woolworths Tweet Your Love Valentine’s Day campaign and contest, their curiosity was piqued and they went online to check it out. When they typed in the URL as it was advertised on the poster, www.woolieslovebird.co.za, they discovered that the URL was not registered.

On their blog, Yuppiechef explains what happened next: “What they meant to write was www.woolieslovebirds.co.za. We can only assume that the hangovers from the Woolies New Year’s parties were the cause for this little oversight. So we did something sneaky: we registered it and now we’re holding it ransom.”

Yuppiechef posted a witty ransom note to the hi-jacked site, telling Woolworths that they were holding its love birds hostage and demanding ransom in the form of donations to the Cape Town-based Soil for Life charity. According to Yuppiechef, Woolworths has agreed to the terms of ransom.

Although some Twitter users have complained about being subjected to a barrage of Woolworths promotional tweets and ‘retweets’, and although we can’t help but wonder if Yuppiechef wasn’t perhaps part of the entire campaign from the beginning, it is heartening to see that a major South African retailer is expanding its online presence.

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