Recently, Walmart and Sheets Energy Strips teamed up with the rapper Pitbull to increase “likers” on Walmart Facebook pages. Pitbull plans to visit whichever Walmart location receives the most “likes” throughout the promotion.  Seems like a pretty good social media campaign for Walmart to increase “likers” to their individual locations’ Facebook pages, right?

Well, that was the plan until David Thorpe (@Arr), a popular writer for the Boston Phoenix, encouraged his readers to all vote for one location: Kodiak, Alaska.  His readers told their friends, the media picked up on it and, as many things on the internet do, it went viral.

The Kodiak, Alaska, Walmart was deemed the winner of the campaign with over 70,000 “likes.” That is a pretty significant number for a place that only has a population of 6,100. So, it sounds like Miami rapper, Pitbull, is headed to the land of the midnight sun. He seems to be in good spirits about the prank, though, saying, “You have to understand I will go anywhere in the world for my fans.”

So maybe Walmart’s social media campaign didn’t go exactly as they thought it would originally, but I would still say it was an overall success. Isn’t one of the major goals of a social media campaign to generate word-of-mouth and buzz?

Photos courtesy of Adweek & Alaska Lovers & Arctic Gear