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Earlier today Facebook shut down the highly successful Burger King Whopper Sacrifice application. The application that we previously wrote about, encourages users to remove ten of their friends in exchange for a free Whopper. The campaign was insanely successful and then Facebook shut it down due to privacy issues. Now the campaign has become arguably even more successful given all the press they’ve received due to today’s events.
Facebook has an ongoing conflict within the organization surrounding policy about what is an acceptable practice and what isn’t on the platform. This is a regular issue for Facebook, especially for Facebook Connect which still doesn’t have a clear policy on fourth party widgets. Mike Arrington argues that Facebook just damaged their ability to show what type of engagement applications can really have.
I’d have to agree. Facebook has shut down promotional applications in the past that have violated their terms, including at least one by Budweiser that was launched prior to Facebook’s change in their terms to enable depiction of alcoholic beverages within applications under certain conditions. Lack of top down control would actually bolster Facebook’s position as a leading platform rather than damage it yet the company continues to step in to police the platform.
Policing the platform is unscalable though and just like on our personal computers, users should have the choice to damage their Facebook experience if they choose to. While temporarily removing a few friends probably didn’t damage user experiences, Facebook argued that the sending of notifications when friends were removed, violated user privacy.
Honestly, I believe that the only thing that was violated is brands’ trust in the security of branded campaigns on Facebook. Alternatively, perhaps it suggests that the only safe company to run a campaign on Facebook is Facebook themselves.
Burger King can thank its management team for continuing to allow for creative out-of-the-box thinking as well as give credit to their Marketing/Creative agency for it. Most of all they get credit for not letting their attorneys and the bureaucracy of their industry get in the way of success. Maybe Facebook should take note on this one. BK +1. FB 0
noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I had sacrificed nine out of ten!!!!!!!!!!!! My free Whopper was so close!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’d disagree that it’s the brands trust that is violated. The app screen scrapes and quite obviously breaks the developer terms and conditions by adding remove notifications. It was only a question of time before Facebook closed it down. The blame falls squarely on the application publisher and the creative team that tried to “get away with it”.
Hey Toby,
I didn’t realize that the app was scraping Facebook. At what point does that take place? I thought it was simply notifying of friend deletions which can be checked by running a call to friends.get when they add the app and then friends.get after they come back to the application.
Best,
Nick
It is a harsh criticism to say only facebook can run a branded campaign inside facebook. AT&T has a Jumbli app and Verizon did a branded campaign which add got their due pr and user following.
I was personally not a fan of the bk ad. Many people who don’t use poke or non-utilitarian apps in facebook have criticized them. But this went against the concept of the social network. Many dropped friends to earn the whopper thinking they’ll add them back.
bk app was bad for facebook not only because it encouraged removing users which is not just good for facebook in their user growth, but more importantly, it went against the fundamental concept that you use facebook to add your real social graph to communicate and share with them with complete control over your privacy. So it makes total sense for facebook to stop an app that caused load on its system by encouraging users to drop users and add them back later.
It had nothing to do with branded campaigns. Many app developers know get emails from facebook for crossing the boundary in terms of spamming users or something, this just got pr because of the bk brand. So it was a win for bk for trying out Facebook after all.
Fortunately my friends found me more important than a free Whopper and did not remove me from their friends list.
Mike