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Frequent guests know of my love for all things Facebook and winsome burger commercials, but I never thought the two would meet so well.
The NY Times reports today about the lose a friend, gain a whopper campaign:
While many trivial actions do prompt Facebook to post an alert to all your friends… striking someone off your list simply is not one of them.
It is this policy that Burger King ran afoul of this month with its “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign, which offered a free hamburger to anyone who severed the sacred bonds with 10 of the friends they had accumulated on Facebook. Facebook suspended the program because Burger King was sending notifications to the castoffs letting them know they’d been dropped for a sandwich (or, more accurately, a tenth of a sandwich).
The campaign, which boasted of ending 234,000 friendships, is history now — Burger King chose to end it rather than tweak it to fit Facebook’s policy…
The ad, which proclaims a Whopper is stronger than friendship, is the first I’ve seen involving the de-leveraging of social networks.
I had thought, back in the day, Facebook did alert one to the changes in tides of friendships so I understand the nature of the policy: one’s social network should only grow. But it does underscore how loose those bounds are: by Burger King’s math, every facebook friend is worth about $.25