Burger King’s latest in a long string of marketing campaigns that are clearly striving for “edgy” bit the dust yesterday.
They created a Burger King Facebook application that coupled with the campaign. The deal was that if an individual used the app to unfriend ten of their Facebook friends, they would receive a free whopper.
It’s funny and I rather enjoyed the campaign.
Personally I unfriended a bunch of people a couple months ago (not part of this campaign) when I realized that I was getting feed updates about people I didn’t actually know. I had a ton of “friends” whom I had met in random places like parties, received friend invites from them, and felt that it was only polite to accept. After a while though it became too much, so I canned a bunch of them.
Anyway, Facebook brought the whopper campaign to an early end because the app that users had to go through to earn their free whopper would notify the unfriended individual of their severed connection. It seems that this violated Facebook policy.
I’m not sure why it matters at all… but I’m also pretty sure I don’t care about Facebook’s policy one way or another. I just thought the campaign was interesting.
In case you were wondering, 233,906 individuals were unfriended since the campaign began less than a week ago. That’s pretty impressive for a corporate viral campaign.
The Geek Whisperer 
It probably motivated a lot of people to ‘trim’ their friends list of people who didn’t really need to be on there, like you said. And they also got a free whopper, of course :D
Unfriend a 170 pound Facebook friend, get a coupon for a 670 calorie Whopper. Special Orders Don’t Upset Us!