Burger King’s Twitter Handler Gets Flame Broiled
By Lindsay Price
Burger King’s community manager is having a serious case of the Mondays.
In a strange turn of events today, the Burger King Twitter handle was hacked and flooded with “news” that it was sold to McDonald’s. With a single tweet, every community manager in the world collectively cringed.
It didn’t take long for the tweets to escalate to stock photos of alleged employees using drugs. In addition, rap videos and f-bombs filled the Twitter feed as it became a one-man show of the bizarre and inappropriate.
Most striking about the hack? It lasted for almost an hour. Our staff struggled to understand how the password wasn’t changed within seconds. Until we realized- it’s President’s Day. We don’t know if the account is managed by a Burger King employee or an agency staff member, but we do know that the person seems to be celebrating George Washington’s birthday instead of monitoring their Twitter feed.
As the dust settles and the over 40,000 new followers linger to see this Whopper of a mistake, it will be interesting to see how Burger King responds to the crisis. Everywhere, for one, hopes that there’s a crisis plan in place.