Beware of competitions on the web, nowhere to hide for Zugu

When price comparison website Cheapflights unveiled its metasearch offshoot Zugu in February it backed the launch with a fun social media competition.

This is nothing new when trying to keep the momentum going around new project and Cheapflights had a good record of engaging with users via its Twitter account.

Anyone curious as to the meaning behind the new Zugu brand was invited to either submit their idea via a widget on the Zugu Facebook page or simply post entries on Twitter – with a very nice prize of free flights for the winning entry.

The first few days following the launch of Zugu saw frenetic activity on both sites as users attempted to establish from where the bizarre name had materialised.

The buzz around the competition was excellent, with even chairman Hugo Burge encouraging people to keep guessing or tell them they might be close to the answer.

Within a week or so, inevitably, the steam ran out and the competition disappeared into the ether of Twitter and the deep conciousness of the players.

Cheapflights unveiled the name of the winning entry last week – @nzbeks on Twitter, a New Zealander living in the UK working in digital marketing and who had previously spent some time at British Airways.

Her winning entry:

Zugu says in its press release: “Zugu stems from the word ‘zugunruhe’, originally a German word.  ’Zug’ refers to movement and migration while ‘unruhe’ refers to restlessness; the compound refers to the migratory behaviour of birds and other animals.”

Unfortunately it has since emerged that someone else was on the same lines – but three days before.

@rtwflights is the Twitter account belonging to flight deals site, RoundTheWorldFlights.com.

When asked about this quirk in the timeline of entries and, more importantly, why @rtwflights did not win, an official from Cheapflights says:

“Whilst it is not explicit in the T’s & C’s that a company cannot enter, or an individual representing a company (in the case of a social media entry), it does state that we have the right to determine eligibility. It was always intended that the prize would go to a private individual which we believe to be the norm for competitions of this sort.  The judges also had to decide who was closest to the meaning of Zugu and the prize went to that person.”

Interestingly, so convinced was Tnooz node Alex Bainbridge (who uses Twitter as an individual) of @rtwflights’s entry as a likely contender that he retweeted it immediately, with what is now a rather prophetic note.

The moral of the story: always get the terms and conditions exactly right and remember that in the transparent world of social media every move is documented.