Posted on 29 January 2009.
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
About Paul Griffiths
Paul has been CEO of MedTouch since April of 2007 and, prior to that, held the position of COO. As a co-founder, he has helped set the vision for the company from its inception. Paul is an active speaker in the healthcare marketing community. In addition to the dozen webinars MedTouch presents each year, Paul can be seen and heard giving lively talks around the country about helping healthcare organizations succeed online: from New England (NESHCo), to Tennessee (TSHPRM), Florida (FSHPRM), and Las Vegas (Annual Healthcare Internet Conference).
Prior to MedTouch, Paul managed online brand experiences for a variety of for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. He has over 15 years of combined experience in online commerce, interactive marketing, experience design and content management solutions. Most notably, he directed the consumer-facing channel for the now defunct Send.com, an online gift delivery network that raised $45 million from such VC luminaries as Greylock, Highland Capital, Benchmark and Charles Rivers Ventures in the late 1990s.
Paul earned a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from Boston University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.
When he’s not traveling across the country to visit clients or to speak at healthcare conferences, Paul runs a humanitarian non-profit with his wife. He’s thrilled to finally have a yard for his dogs and two boys, and often daydreams of spending a summer in Iceland.
