“Facebook shuns Burger King app”… Makes sense to me

I saw a link yesterday about  a marketing campaign from Burger King which was a facebook app designed by Burger offering a free whopper to anyone who dumped ten friends from their network. When I read it I thought, “what a stupid and nasty way to get publicity”, but I did acknowledge that it was probably going to be widely successful in achieving that aim because it created a talking point.  It was too, until facebook decided to bar the app because it told people when they were being removed from someone’s friend list.

While I agree with the TechCrunch article in thinking that facebook’s reasoning is a bit weak, I don’t agree that this is a “great example to show the Madison Avenue agencies on how a big brand can get real engagement from users”.  I think it may have gotten people to slim their overinflated friend counts, but seriously, did the advertising agency think about the medium they were using? I am also at a loss to see any engagement benefiting facebook as the campaign is about disengagement between facebook users. Sending an “Angry-Gram” via the Burger King app creates conversations about Burger King, which is great, but is still essentially damaging facebook’s engagement with its users.

I also disagree with the casual dismissal of the consequences of the app stated in the article as “all that happened is the user being dissed got a message telling them, which helps the application spread virally”. In this instance, the further the app spread, the smaller facebook’s social footprint because it caused connections to be broken, not created. This means that as a corporate entity Burger King were using facebook (also a corporate entity) to esentailly damage its own connections (and its revenue source) and get Burger King publicity and revenue in the process. Why should facebook put up with something that essentially goes against its basic tenet of connecting people? Facebook obviously made the decision that the benefits of a large scale marketing campaign of this nature were outweighed by the damage it was doing to their network, and who can blame them?

I don’t agree with lots of things facebook do (your not-so-new layout still sucks guys!), but in this instance I can see why they acted as they did. I think in essence, Burger King’s campaigns are good, but facebook has obviously decided that the damage on this one outweighs the benefits to them and canned it.  As a business, that’s their prerogative.