Burritoful Social Media Prank
Chipotle does it again. They shocked the world with their creative social media wits and performed a digital prank having most fooled.
In case you didn’t hear, Chipotle’s Twitter account was “hacked”. Over this past weekend, every social media enthusiast was tweeting and blogging about the big news.
Chipotle’s “hacked” tweets were extremely odd and random to say the least. It appeared as if someone was talking to Siri and was having no luck.
Of course, since Chipotle is a major brand, the hacking story took off. The “hacker’s” tweets resulted in over 11,000 rewteets and major publications like Mashable and BuzzFeed were typing away. The journalists reacted just like everyone else, confused.
Little did everyone know, it was all just a clever marketing scheme to help raise awareness about their current promotion, Adventurrito.
Each day during their Adventurrito promotion, participants are asked to solve a branded focused puzzle for a chance to win 20 years of free burritos! The “hacker’s” tweets are a vital clue to the tenth daily puzzle. The promotion is running for 20 days with a new puzzle each day, so the planned prank served as a great mid-campaign boost.
Promotion participants began flaunting to Chipotle’s Twitter profile and Googling for the answer. The numerous published articles most certainly helped.
While everyone screamed “OH NO!” at the first sign of a possible hacker, Chipotle just laughed amongst themselves and let the magic of social media happen.
It’s risks like these that change a brand’s online reputation and digital promotion from good to out of this world great.
Creating a Facebook application or social media campaign will get some buzz and “likes”, but will it transform the way consumers view your brand? Not all basic social media campaigns currently do this. With the right tactics and risks, social media can help change a Facebook “like” to a loyal consumer.
It’s important to note that Chipotle never officially made a statement about a planned hack, this is all just speculation and opinion. However, it would have been mighty difficult for Chipotle to edit their micro-site and campaign content to create a puzzle about the “hacking” shortly after it happened. You do the math.
*Update 7/25:
Chris Arnold acknowledged my blog post on his personal Twitter account, stating my article was correct.
Hours later Mashable published an article with Arnold as a source.
