Grown Up Thinking

I think we’ve all seen them by now–your friends tag you in pictures of South Park characters, superheros or those colorful cartoon characters you recognize but can’t remember what they’re called. This trend seems to catch on more and more every day with a new iteration hitting Facebook every 12 hours. You look in the picture, and scroll through the image to find out which one you are–the cute one? the fun one? the Arab????

Let’s face it–these photos are fun and harmless, and most generate some spirited discussion in the comments section. Still, one has to admit that this practice is a pretty boldfaced example of stereotyping.  I’m just waiting for the stories to surface of friendships ended or relationships terminated because the tagger didn’t quite think through their choices. I mean does anyone really want to be tagged as the ginger (not that there’s anything wrong with that)? As my mom used to say growing up, it’s all fun and games until someone gets their feelings irrevocably hurt by an internet meme.

Few things in the 2.0 era have received so much buzz so quickly as Skittle’s recent social media effort. I logged on to Twitter yesterday to a literal hashstorm of all things Skittles. I realize people get excited about candy, but this was ridiculous. What was going on? Obviously I did what any responsible digital marketing  professional would do–I went to Skittles.com.

Something wasn’t right–why did Skittles.com take me to Twitter’s search page with a little branded overlay on the top left?  Where’s the flashed out, high res animated page loader? Where’s the ambiguously organized homepage with different content engagement opportunities?  All I could see were different users’ tweets about Skittles. I clicked around the overlay, and was taken to….Facebook? This was something entirely new.

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When two old acquaintances and Facebook friends sacrificed me for a lousy Whopper, I knew Burger King was onto something big… and that my feelings were just a little bit hurt. Burger King had created a successful Facebook application called the Whopper Sacrifice, which rewarded people with a free Whopper for sacrificing 10 friends. A brilliant concept that I wish I’d thought of. It’s so great because it has everything a successful Facebook app needs. It has an incentive, it has a viral component, and it’s useful.

There’s currently an oversaturation of Facebook applications out there. Many companies see that Facebook is the new thing but they haven’t figured out how to use it yet. A lot of companies force applications or features, regardless of whether people want them or not. Part of the success of the Burger King application is that it came out of necessity to let people do some spring-cleaning to their buddy lists. Using caution to not make the application seem mean spirited, it was given a lighthearted spin with the message, “Todd likes you but loves the Whopper. Todd sacrificed you for a free burger at Whopper Sacrifice.” 184,000 sacrifices later, it’s still going strong.

ADDED: 1/22 – In a sad moment for marketers, Facebook removed the Whopper Sacrifice from their website, but not before nearly 234,000 friends were scarfificed. Facebook claimed that the application violated their policy that people cannot be notified when they are unfriended. A modified version of the app is expected to go live shortly.