One lucky user of China’s Twitter-like blogging website Weibo will need to worry about more than likes, in the coming days. Weibo user “Bufuhshu” has won the prize that is ‘15,000 kilograms of watermelons’. The prize is part of an online lucky-draw by Alibaba's fresh food retail unit, Hema; essentially a marketing gimmick that seems to have gone over well on Chinese social media.
According to lucky-draw rules published last week, every 10 re-posts of a Hema marketing article would add 0.5 kilogram of watermelon to a prize pool, which in the end would go to one person. By Thursday, the day for the final announcement, the article had been re-posted over 300,000 times. That meant user “Bufuhshu” was eligible for the 15 tons of watermelons.
What to do with more than 3,000 watermelons
Hema’s official Weibo account said Bufushu has requested to receive cash equivalent instead of the fruit. However, according to an article on caixinglobal.com, other Weibo users, whose re-posts created the gargantuan prize, will vote to decide whether Bufushu will get the physical melons or the cold hard cash, Hema said.
