Click n Mix n Collaboration: Woolies 2.0

2228399 — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 08:06:00 GMT

Bringing back Woolies was never going to be an easy task given that the old Woolworths was such a loved institution. So it's been nice to see the Woolies team embrace social media, and place collaboration at the core of its brand strategy. To a point it was a no brainer - if people love the Woolies brand and (mostly) loved the Wollies product range, then why not get those people closely involved in developing the newly revamped Woolies 2.0.

Over the last 20 weeks, since the Barclay Brothers bought the Woolworths brand, the Woolies team have been getting their loyal following involved in the relaunch process as much as possible by blogging, Facebooking and Twittering. And with much success: the Woolworths blog has had over 500,000 visits and nearing 1000 comments; Twitter 2380 followers; 5,865 Facebook fans.

Importantly the Woolies team seems to have been genuinely listening to the their customers - and in particular have brought back an online version of their much loved Pic n Mix - which they've dubbed Click n Mix - which I love!

Happily the guys at Glue kindly dropped off a bag of Click n Mix to the office yesterday, which I devoured like a school-kid.

You can see my v.amateur video tour of Woolies' Click n Mix here:

Is social media too wordy???

2228399 — Thu, 14 May 2009 07:18:00 GMT

I've been following Woolworth's re-launch over the last few months and really like how they've optimised the use of social media to maintain that loveable / close relationship Woolies always had with its customers.

Whilst readying themselves for their big launch in the coming months, Woolies have been maintaining their customer love + building new love via the usual social media channels: blog, twitter and facebook. They've also added a nice aural aspect to their social media by using Last.fm and Spotify by creating "Now that's what I call Woolworths". That's a great innovation + nice and quirky + very Woolies.

However, one thing that the Woolies social media team seem to have missed is pictures! There's a real lack of imagery on the Woolies blog - there's not even a photo of the mysterious Woolies blogger Matthew - and given that much of a shopping brand experience is visual (think of those overladen-toy-covered shelves that used to fill Woolworths) they seem to be missing a trick.

With the recent surge in Twitter usage, social media seems to have been over-run by words, and the humble image has been left behind. If a picture paints a thousand words, then maybe we should all be vlogging + flickring rather than tweeting, Or maybe that's the problem, images say a little too much - 1000 words rather than 140 characters . . .

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Click n Mix n Collaboration: Woolies 2.0

Is social media too wordy???