Update: Chipotle’s Marketing Strategy: “Let’s hack our own Twitter Account”

On Sunday, Chipotle hacked their own Twitter account, and sent Tweets that meant absolutely nothing. Like these:

Well congratulations Chipotle! You created the dumbest viral Twitter campaign ever! (Hey, at least it wasn’t as bad as this!)

If every social media manager came up with a campaign to hack their own account in the hopes of increasing exposure, we’d be in a global shortage of people who know how to use social media (we never had many of these gurus to start). When interviewed by Mashable, Chris Arnold from Chipotle said that it increased their retweets from 75 to 12,000 for the series of hacked tweets. That means, hundreds of thousands of users found out that Chipotle “Hit Send too soon!”

So how does the “campaign” help their brand? It doesn’t. Sure they may have gained a few thousand followers, but these followers now see Chipotle as a brand that cannot manage social media. Supposedly, it was supposed to increase exposure as they approached their 20th anniversary.

20 years of burritos later, and they can’t launch a successful Twitter campaign? Don’t get me wrong, I won’t just criticize, so here’s a suggestion I came up with while brushing my teeth as an alternative to promoting their 20th anniversary:

• A campaign asking fans to submit a 15-second YouTube video of their most “spiciest” moment in their life. (Or a 6-second Vine video) with a hashtag. Hashtags and fan-submitted video always goes vial. Throw in a contest and this will create viral content much faster than acting dumb on your own Twitter account.

As hard as I look, I can’t find any parallels between guacamole and hacked tweets. If you do see something different than me, feel free to comment below.

UPDATE: I asked Scott Stratten (@unmarketing) what his thoughts were to Chipotle’s series of tweets, and this is what he had to say:



@michaelcacho I don't believe it was. I think they were covering up for an actual screw-up.

— Scott Stratten (@unmarketing) July 26, 2013

What do you think about Scott’s comments? I never considered this angle before, but I guess it could have been possible.

Follow @michaelcacho on Twitter.