37 cents is the value of a Facebook friend
The New York Times blog Bits has a post on an interesting marketing strategy by Burger King on Facebook:
You may not be able to get a coupon for a digital TV converter box, but if you’re experiencing a bit of bloat on your Facebook friend list, you can snag a free burger by dropping 10 of your Facebook friends, courtesy of Burger King.
That’s the gist of Whopper Sacrifice, an advertising campaign from Burger King to promote a new version of the company’s flagship sandwich called the Angry Whopper. To earn their free burger, users download the Whopper Sacrifice Facebook application and dump 10 unlucky friends deemed to be unworthy of their weight in beef. After completing the purge, users are prompted to enter their addresses and the coupons are sent out via snail mail.
The application sends a note to each of the banished friends, bluntly alerting them that they were abandoned for a free hamburger.
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For Willie Vanderheyden, 31, a graduate student in Missouri with more than 200 Facebook friends, the free burger seemed like a fair trade for purging his address book.
“It’s a good excuse to get rid of old girlfriends and their families on my account and get a Whopper out of it,” he said in a phone interview. “There are so many people on Facebook that I haven’t talked to in a long time that getting rid of 10 of them who are pretty much meaningless in my daily life isn’t going to be a big deal.”
But in a follow-up e-mail message a few hours later, Mr. Vanderheyden found that eliminating friends was harder than he thought. He said he got stuck at seven. “It’s not like I hate any of these people,” he wrote. “The question is: Do I like one-tenth of a Whopper more than the information these people could one day post on Facebook?”
Emily Koster, a 25-year-old legal assistant and self-described vegetarian in Sacramento, Calif., said she had no such qualms.
Ms. Koster, who currently has more than 400 Facebook friends, said she isn’t worried about any residual awkward encounters among those she selects to delete. “I look at it this way — the upset over any confrontation is greatly outweighed by the pleasure I’m going to get when they actually admit they’re upset over Facebook,” she said in an e-mail message.
She added in a later note, “The relationships will be easily reparable. Chances are, they’ll still be my friend on MySpace.”
Read more here.
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