Chipotle has admitted that the brand was behind the series of what seemed like strange tweets from a hacking last weekend, fessing up to Mashable.
On Sunday, their account @ChipotleTweets began posting odd messages such as “Find avocado store in Arvada, Colorado” and, “Hi sweetie, can you please pick up some lime, salt, and onions twitter.” Shortly after, a “Joe” from the company’s social management team posted a message that seemed to confirm a hack.
“Sorry all. We had a little problem with our account. But everything is back on track now!” the company posted.
Brand accounts getting hacked on Twitter seem to be frequent these days, and now apparently so are fake hacks orchestrated for publicity. Earlier this year, Burger King and Jeep both experienced real hackers taking over their Twitter accounts. Shortly afterwards, Viacom-owned networks MTV and BET pretended to be victims of hacks.
According to Chipotle’s admission, their “hacked” tweets were actually part of the restaurant chain’s “Adventurrito” promotion, a series of 20 puzzles in 20 days celebrating its 20th anniversary. The fake hacking puzzle was of course about the ingredients that go into guacamole.
“We thought that people would pay attention, that it would cut through people’s attention and make them talk, and it did that,” company spokesperson Chris Arnold told Mashable.
That, it did. According to Arnold, Chipotle’s Twitter account added more than 4,000 followers the day of the “hack,” compared to its normal rate of adding about 250 followers a day. And the tweets in question – which have not been deleted by the way – were retweeted about 12,000 times. By comparison, Chipotle’s Twitter account usually sees about 75 retweets per day.
Some social media and PR pundits are already mourning the loss of reliability that a brand can suffer by lying to its fans. What do you think of the marketing strategy?
Source: Ad Week
