Social sacrifice

DESCRIPTION

Burger King wanted to prove that consumers will go the extra mile in order to get hold of the fast food chain’s flame-broiled ‘Whopper’ hamburger.

Most members of social networking site Facebook will admit that they have a few random online friends who they never spoke to at school or who they didn’t recognise at the time of friendship acceptance. But what about 10? If not, which friends would they cull in order to get a free burger? This is precisely the social quandary that Burger King threw into the networking mix with its "Whopper Sacrifice". Burger King designed a Facebook application that didn’t encourage users to join a group, find new friends, or evangelise about the brand. Instead, it encouraged them to commit social networking suicide and get rid of friends. The idea is thus: visit http://www.whoppersacrifice.com/, install the sacrificial application onto your Facebook profile, delete 10 friends, and receive a coupon for a free Whopper hamburger. Not only are the victims alerted to the fact that they have been sacrificed for a hamburger, but that sacrifices also appear in the Facebooker's news feed. It is currently only available in the US and so far, almost 200,000 friends have been sacrificed.

UPDATE: The application was sacrificed after just a week, with Facebook citing privacy issues. A spokesman said: “We encourage creativity from developers and brands using Facebook Platform, but we also must ensure that applications follow users’ expectations of privacy. This application facilitated activity that ran counter to user privacy by notifying people when a user removes a friend. We have reached out to the developer with suggested solutions. In the meantime, we are taking the necessary steps to assure the trust users have established on Facebook is maintained.”

IMAGES