I’ve been considering Twitter and Facebook and Bebo and other social networks. Social networks are the way to market yourself to a very large audience in dramatically small amounts of time. Burger King utilized the viral nature of social networks to spread the brand while drawing even more attention from the victims of the “Whopper Sacrifice.” The marketing program allowed users of Facebook to sacrifice friends in exchange for food. Apparently over 82,000 people used the Facebook application to purge 230,000 friends from their Facebook roster. So, this is the price of freedom. About 2.8 friends. The odd thing about this situation is that it took a sacrifice of at least 10 people. Part of the viral nature of the Sacrifice was that when you sacrificed someone, they were notified that they were removed which apparently ran counter to Facebooks privacy policy. Burger King has had a sort of angry and vengeful series of commercials running lately, trying to make the chain come across as cool and edgy and in-your-face… perhaps they can counter this by suggesting people add friends to their roster and in exchange for 20 additions, they get a free Whopper.
James Hatch
Researching the merging of Business, Technology & Ethics
