Fresh, Never Frozen Tweets
One of the most hilarious corporate social media wins in my opinion is currently being done by Wendy’s on their Twitter account. While most corporate social media accounts aim to provide kind, respectful responses to messages from the public, Wendy’s has recently flipped this upside down and has began replying in the most savage way possible without getting into sensitive issues.
Whenever someone sends a tweet to Wendy’s criticizing their food, or naming a competitor, the social media manager has been generally swift to reply within an hour with a witty comeback that in at least one case, has resulted in a Twitter user deleting their account after the fast food chain ridiculed them because they “forgot refrigerators existed for a moment there” (replying to the user when they accused Wendy’s of lying and that their beef HAS to be frozen because the only alternative is to “deliver it raw on a hot truck”).
A lot of the recent Tweets to Wendy’s are seemingly jokes or horrible attempts at trolling in order to receive a roasting, with the social media campaign clearly stirring up a lot of interest in online communities, as it’s providing an endless supply of entertainment. This campaign is an excellent example of how canned content can provide an extremely personal, crafted, and specific response to provide something which a large audience finds hilarious. One could argue that some of these tweets are too vicious and personal, with Wendy’s often calling out people who have minimal or zero followers when they try to insult the fast food chain. In my opinion, this isn’t so much of a bad thing, but just a more “real” exchange with someone online. Let’s face it, while these responses from Wendy’s can certainly be a bit savage, they are nowhere near the level of insults that one would find on nearly any YouTube video’s comment page, or even a controversial post on Facebook.
Whoever the social media manager or management team is for Wendy’s is/are, they are certainly doing an amazing job at producing canned content on an hourly basis. In fact, they are responding to people so often that I have had difficulty loading all the previous Tweets to provide examples for this blog post. It can be a challenge to produce such relevant, and personal content on a daily basis, especially when they have to figure out dozens of witty responses to the question “What should I get at McDonald’s?”(so far most responses have been related to getting directions to Wendy’s).
I believe that this campaign is, and will continue to work extremely well because nobody really expects a corporation to break the general nice and professional method of responding to messages. The use of canned content in this campaign allows the company to respond to as many messages as possible, even if they are attempting to insult the restaurant chain, or promote its competitors. Nowadays when the market is flooded with the same sort of advertisements for all fast food, it’s definitely refreshing to see a company who is willing to push the envelope when engaging with people on social media.
