Going Viral: Wendy’s Twitter Success Story

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Over the past few posts, we’ve explored instances in which brands have failed to meet the mark, and struggled to resonate with much of their target audience, as was the case with Protein World’s ‘Beach Body Ready’ campaign and the ‘Boaty McBoatface’ fiasco. However, whilst it is indeed important to learn from these arguable failures, it is perhaps of greater importance to explore instances in which brands have succeeded in resonating with their target audience through social media.

The inherent openness that stems from social media platforms can present brands with a great opportunity to not only meet or exceed the expectations of a single customer, but also presents a further opportunity for the content to go viral – providing the brand with a cheap, quick, and effective way to reach a global audience. In this final post, we are going to explore the recent case of Wendy’s, and how an accidental marketing campaign broke Twitter records.

Wendy’s

Wendy’s, for those that don’t know, is a fast food chain operating within the United States. Therefore, you wouldn’t be blamed for assuming that their Twitter page would simply be a plain, boring platform, in which the posts largely revolve around publicising their latest sales promotions and answering customer support requests, akin to the likes of Pizza Hut (Pizza Hut, 2017) or Subway (Subway, 2017). Yet, whilst there are indeed some of the more ‘vanilla’ posts being made via Wendy’s Twitter account (Wendy’s, 2017), the person (or people) behind the account is no stranger to taking the opportunity to inject some personality in to their posts, quickly becoming a hit with the largely millennial demographic of Twitter (Ngo, N.d.).

Wendy's getting sassy with their audience.

Wendy’s getting sassy with their audience.

Enter Carter Wilkerson (Wilkerson, 2017), a teenage Twitter used based in Reno, Nevada. Carter, seemingly eager for the opportunity to barter for some free chicken nuggets from Wendy’s, sent a tweet to their account requesting how many retweets would be required in order to bag a free year’s worth of nuggets from the fast food chain. In response, Wendy’s adopted their usual mischievous tone and set a seemingly impossible goal of 18 million retweets – a figure that would surpass the then most retweeted post of all-time (Smith, 2014) by around 500%.

Carter trying his luck.

Whilst a lot of people at this point would concede, Carter instead used this opportunity to launch a Twitter campaign of his own, supported by the #nuggsforcarter hashtag. And of course, the story quickly went viral across both Twitter and the news media, with a seemingly unending number of publications picking up the story and promoting his cause (Molloy, 2017; Independent, 2017) – even gaining the support of celebrities along the way:

Even Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul got involved.

The publicity machine was at this point churning at full speed, providing the ‘snowball effect’ (Goode, 2009) that helps spur content to become viral. Now, just one month later, Carter and Wendy’s have broken the record for the world’s most retweets (Stephenson, 2017), at over 3.55 million at the time of writing (Wilkerson, 2017).

Whilst Carter hasn’t quite met his target, Wendy’s were presumably very satisfied with this record-breaking result, giving the teen his much-deserved year’s supply of chicken nuggets, as well as donating $100,000 to The Dave Thomas Foundation, a charity that Carter supported throughout his campaign (Wendy’s, 2017).

 

Carter recieving his well-deserved nuggets.

The Metrics

 After all this commotion, what does this actually mean for Wendy’s? Well, in a period of just one month, their Twitter account managed to gain over 240,000 followers during the span of the #nuggsforcarter campaign, increasing the number of followers by 15% to bring them to a total of 1.82 million from 1.58 million (Wendy’s, 2017).

Furthermore, Wendy’s continued support of Carter enabled them to generate thousands of likes and retweets across each of their posts that made reference to the campaign. As well as Wendy’s increasing their own amount of followers and helping to break Twitter records, they also benefited from the free publicity provided by the news media, with major news sites such as Forbes and the New York Times following the story until its conclusion (Stark, 2017; Victor, 2017) .

Lessons to be Learned

 So why did this event resonate so well with their audience? Well, it is first important to establish just who Wendy’s Twitter audience are. A study from the Pew Research Center identified that the most likely demographic to use Twitter are indeed young adults, aged 18-29 (Duggan and Brenner, 2012), placing this audience closely within the millennial generation bracket. Now that this has been ascertained, we can begin to explore why they may have responded so well to this event.

Palfrey and Gasser (2011) describe millennials as being:

“Joined by a set of common practices, including the amount of time they spend using digital technologies, their tendency to multitask, their tendency to express themselves and relate to one another in ways mediated by digital technologies, and their patterns of using the technologies to access and use information and create new knowledge and art forms” (Palfrey and Gasser, 2011).

Furthermore, several studies have been conducted on millennial behaviour in both high school and college classes, with most concluding that millennials largely reject authority, relate well to humour and technical prowess, and possess a strong sense of community among their peers (Berenson, 2008; Price, 2010; Klice, 2010).

Wendy’s seemingly hit the mark on all the criteria, using humour and relatability to address their audience and promote Carter’s cause. Furthermore, the content and language of Wendy’s Twitter posts is largely indistinguishable from the audience themselves, and implies an-almost anti-authoritarian approach through breaking the preconceived notions of the content expected from a multi-billion dollar company.  This helps to create a sense of irony, and could encourage the audience to accept the person running the account as one of their own, consequently becoming more willing to engage with the content.

Cases like this potentially signify a changing digital marketing landscape. Perhaps, in the future, there may be less reliance on a strong, planned, social campaign, and instead companies could begin to embrace user-created, organic campaigns in the hopes of increasing engagement and relatability with their audience. After all, what better way to create relatable content than having your audience create it themselves?

For more sassy corporate Twitter accounts, click here.

 

 

 

 

References:

Berenson, S. (2008). Educating Millennial Law Students for Public Obligation. 1st ed. [ebook] San Diego: Charlotte Law Review. Available at: https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=399000101024080086090012092123017085052064046049049050078074022092000066004094116023037114102042000002119104002064020000082094021017027075017072083083095066125077048058010029019069121068094095023081096118127124026125095030107122094119070010020000121&EXT=pdf [Accessed 10 May 2017].

Duggan, M. and Brenner, J. (2012). The Demographics of Social Media Users – 2012. 1st ed. [ebook] Washington, DC: Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. Available at: http://www.nwnjsbdc.com/upload/PIP_SocialMediaUsers%20Demographics%202012.pdf [Accessed 10 May 2017].

Goode, L. (2009). Social news, citizen journalism and democracy. New Media & Society, 11(8), pp.1287-1305.

Independant (2017). A teenager’s request for chicken nuggets is going viral. [online] The Independent. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/nuggs-please-chicken-nugget-teenager-charlie-wilkerson-twitter-request-retweets-millions-a7678516.html [Accessed 10 May 2017].

Kice, B. (2010). Humorous Commercials, Millennial Students, and the Classroom. Texas Speech Communication Journal Online. [online] Available at: http://www.etsca.com/tscjonline/0810-commercials/ [Accessed 10 May 2017].

Molloy, M. (2017). Student makes ridiculous Twitter bet for free Wendy’s chicken nuggets. [online] The Telegraph. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/08/student-makes-ridiculous-twitter-bet-free-wendys-chicken-nuggets/ [Accessed 10 May 2017].

Ngo, H. (n.d.). Wendy’s Is Roasting People On Twitter, And It’s Brutally Funny.. [online] LifeBuzz. Available at: http://www.lifebuzz.com/wendys-twitter/ [Accessed 10 May 2017].

Palfrey, J. and Gasser, U. (2011). Born Digital: Understanding the first generation of digital natives. 1st ed. Sydney: Read How You Want.

Pizza Hut (2017). Pizza Hut (@pizzahut) | Twitter. [online] Twitter.com. Available at: https://twitter.com/pizzahut [Accessed 10 May 2017].

Price, C. (2010). The New “R”s for Engaging Millennial Learners. Essays from E ‐ xcellence in Teaching, [online] 9, pp.29-31. Available at: https://teachpsych.org/Resources/Documents/ebooks/eit2009.pdf#page=29 [Accessed 10 May 2017].

Smith, C. (2014). Ellen DeGeneres’ Oscars selfie smashes Obama retweet record on Twitter. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/03/ellen-degeneres-selfie-retweet-obama [Accessed 10 May 2017].

Stark, H. (2017). Carter Wilkerson: The Nuggets Guy Who Broke Twitter. [online] Forbes.com. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/haroldstark/2017/05/03/carter-wilkerson-the-nuggets-guy-who-broke-twitter/#199846956ab4 [Accessed 10 May 2017].

Stephenson, K. (2017). Nuggs For Carter breaks Ellen’s Twitter retweets world record. [online] Guinness World Records. Available at: http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2017/5/nuggs-for-carter-breaks-ellens-selfie-world-record-471254 [Accessed 10 May 2017].

Subway (2017). SUBWAY® (@SUBWAY) | Twitter. [online] Twitter.com. Available at: https://twitter.com/subway [Accessed 10 May 2017].

Victor, D. (2017). Step Aside, Ellen DeGeneres: The New Retweet Champion Is a Nugget-Hungry Teenager. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/technology/wendys-nuggets-twitter.html?_r=0 [Accessed 10 May 2017].

Wendy’s (2017). Wendy’s on Twitter. [online] Twitter. Available at: https://twitter.com/Wendys/status/861642615569223680 [Accessed 10 May 2017].

Wendy’s (2017). Wendy’s on Twitter. [online] Twitter. Available at: https://twitter.com/Wendys/status/861938018806095872 [Accessed 10 May 2017].

Wilkerson, C. (2017). Carter Wilkerson (@carterjwm) | Twitter. [online] Twitter.com. Available at: https://twitter.com/carterjwm [Accessed 10 May 2017].

Wilkerson, C. (2017). Carter Wilkerson on Twitter. [online] Twitter. Available at: https://twitter.com/carterjwm/status/849813577770778624 [Accessed 10 May 2017].

 

Polls and Trolls: How to Respond to Vote Manipulation

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Creating a poll can be a great way to get your community directly involved in your digital marketing campaign, allowing a rare opportunity for businesses and individuals to provide the users with exactly what they’re asking for. However, due to the nature of the internet, this leaves a glaring opportunity for these polls to be targeted for manipulation by online pranksters and trolls. Often this leaves the creator of the poll with a difficult choice – do you ignore the result and risk alienating your fans, or do you go ahead with the unintended outcome and risk failing to meet the objectives of your campaign? In this post, we’re going to explore two ‘victims’ of vote manipulation, and how the responses to the results were received by the public.

Pitbull

In June of 2012, the American musician and rapper Pitbull launched an online campaign with Walmart and Sheets breath strips, offering users the chance to have the musician personally appear at the Walmart branch with the most likes on their Facebook page. What they likely hadn’t anticipated was Twitter user David Thorpe’s (Thorpe, 2012) apparent disdain for Pitbull, driving him to launch a campaign of his own, #ExilePitbull, to unite internet users in voting to send him to Kodiak, Alaska – a remote town with a population of just 6,130 people (Census.gov, 2017).

David Thorpe’s posts, which kicked off the #ExilePitbull movement.

Thorpe’s campaign resulted in Walmart Kodiak’s Facebook page receiving over 70,000 likes (Lafferty, 2012) – over ten times the population of the town, causing the branch to soar to the top of the poll and ‘win’ the competition. At this point you’d probably expect Walmart and Pitbull to dismiss the vote due to obvious manipulation, however, in an unexpected move, Pitbull actually agreed to visit the branch, and furthermore invited Mr Thorpe along with him (Pitbull, 2012).

David Thorpe meets Pitbull in Kodiak, Alaska.

So how was the campaign received? Well, after the initial campaign video received a relatively lukewarm reception, gaining just 36,000 lifetime views on YouTube (Walmart, 2012) and 19,000 likes on Pitbull’s Facebook page (Pitbull, 2012), the follow-up video received over 370,000 YouTube views (Walmart, 2012) and 59,000 likes on his Facebook post (Pitbull, 2012), with several high-profile newspapers (Farberov, 2012) also covering the story. Furthermore, many people reported that despite not being a fan of Pitbull, they had formed a newfound respect for the musician after sticking to the internet’s decision.

Users across the internet found a newfound respect for the musician.

Through embracing the campaign’s result, Pitbull, Walmart, and Sheets breath strips managed to circumvent potentially negative press and create a situation in which all parties involved came out positively. Whether or not the campaign would have received as much traction without the ‘aid’ of online trolls is debatable, but it can be said with certainty that Pitbull’s reaction created a heart-warming gesture to the people of Kodiak and his fans and critics alike, helping to boost his own image and reputation and create some new fans along the way.

Boaty McBoatface

2016 proved to be an extremely divisive year, with the Brexit vote (Hanley, 2017), the US presidential election (Peters, Thee-Brenan and Sussman, 2016), and of course, Boaty McBoatface. In the Spring of 2016, the NERC (Natural Environmental Research Council), seemingly oblivious to the dangers of creating an online poll, decided to allow the public a chance to name their latest research vessel through a vote hosted on their website (NERC, 2016). The poll had a relatively tame start, with more traditional (and arguably more boring) names such as the RRS Henry Worsely and RRS David Attenborough being initially put forward, until former radio presenter, James Hand, jokingly suggested calling the vessel ‘Boaty McBoatface’.

James Hand found his suggestion gaining traction.

Of course, with the internet being the internet, the suggestion quickly gained traction across Twitter and the news media, until the name found itself being by far the most popular suggestion on the website, beating the runner-up by over three times the amount of votes (NERC, 2016).

The final result of the vote.

The vote was concluded on the 16th April 2016, after receiving over 250,000 votes on the poll in just one month (NERC, 2016), leaving everybody questioning whether they would actually follow through with the user vote. Meanwhile, the internet seemed divided, with many firmly stating that the NERC should abide by the result, arguing that the name could be used as a tool to foster interest in the vessel’s mission and promote science amongst children, whilst the other side made the argument that the name ‘Boaty McBoatface’ would make a mockery of the institution and would not be a suitable name.

Mixed reactions to the poll.

Ultimately, the NERC decided against the result, and selected the fourth most popular ‘RRS David Attenborough’ as the name for the ship, which had only received 11,000 votes (Khomami, 2016). This served to bring anger and disappointment to many, who saw it as a missed opportunity and in some more extreme cases, a damning indictment of democracy. A few months later, the NERC did somewhat concede and named a submarine on-board the RRS Attenborough as Boaty McBoatface in a move to recognise it’s former popularity and finally attempt to put the issue to rest (Knapton, 2016) – helping to appeasing those on both sides of the argument.

So What Can Be Learned?

 Creating an online poll can indeed help to promote your digital campaign, creating engagement and retention – two key objectives in a campaign as new generations of consumers demand more online interaction from businesses (Ryan and Jones, 2017).  Depending on who you ask, these campaigns may be viewed either in a positive or negative light in regards to the outcome, but it can be said with near certainty that these polls helped to generate a huge amount of engagement and attention that may otherwise have not been attainable if not for the ‘hijacking’ by the public.

 As we have seen in this post, whilst an online user poll can be a great way to captivate your audience and even reach beyond your target market, it is an avenue that could cause harm to your brand when not handled correctly. When choosing to create a poll that determines the outcome of your campaign, it is important to remember that vote manipulation is not just a possibility, but oftentimes can be almost guaranteed, and must be planned for accordingly. As Wilson, Robson and Botha (2017) state, once a poll has been voted on by the public it is too late for managers to intervene, and “a firm’s best and sometimes only option is to go along for the ride” (Wilson, Robson and Botha, 2017).

Whilst there are cases when it is obviously acceptable to go against your user base (Rosenfeld, 2017), often these votes are nothing more than harmless pranks, that if entertained, can help to impress your audience and create new customers, as was the case for Pitbull, Walmart, and Sheets. And in the case of Boaty McBoatface, whilst many are likely to have been disappointed, the campaign did certainly help to create awareness and interest in an otherwise likely unknown vessel and mission.

For more online poll hijinks, click here.

 

 

 

 

References:

Census.gov. (2017). Population estimates, July 1, 2015, (V2015). [online] Available at: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/0240950 [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].

Farberov, S. (2012). Kodiak moment: Rapper Pitbull visits remote Alaskan island after successful online campaign to send him into ‘exile’. [online] Mail Online. Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2181414/Kodiak-moment-Rapper-Pitbull-visits-remote-Alaskan-island-successful-online-campaign-send-exile.html [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].

Hanley, L. (2017). Parallel lives: how the Brexit vote revealed Britain’s divided culture. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/18/lynsey-hanley-brexit-britain-divided-culture-uses-of-literacy [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].

Khomami, N. (2016). ‘Boaty McBoatface’ ship to be called RRS Sir David Attenborough. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/06/boaty-mcboatface-ship-to-be-called-rrs-sir-david-attenborough [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].

Knapton, S. (2016). ‘BoatyMcBoatface’ to live on as yellow submarine, science minister Jo Johnson announces. [online] The Telegraph. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/05/06/boatymcboatface-to-live-on-as-yellow-submarine-science-minister/ [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].

Lafferty, J. (2012). It’s Official: Facebook Contest Sends Pitbull To Kodiak, Alaska. [online] Adweek.com. Available at: http://www.adweek.com/digital/pitbull-facebook-walmart-kodiak/ [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].

NERC (2016). Entries | NERC. [online] Nameourship.nerc.ac.uk. Available at: https://nameourship.nerc.ac.uk/entries.html [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].

NERC (2016). Name our Ship | NERC. [online] Nameourship.nerc.ac.uk. Available at: https://nameourship.nerc.ac.uk/ [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].

Peters, J., Thee-Brenan, M. and Sussman, D. (2016). Election Exit Polls Reveal a Starkly Divided Nation. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html?_r=0 [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].

Pitbull (2012). Pitbull. [online] Facebook.com. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/pitbull/posts/479784138714471?match=d2FsbWFydA%3D%3D [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].

Pitbull (2012). Pitbull Walmart Challenge. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4DrFBkl1yc [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].

Pitbull (2012). Walmart and Sheets Challenge: Kodiak, Alaska | Facebook. [online] Facebook.com. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150976650582401.410295.95051637400&type=3&match=d2FsbWFydA%3D%3D [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].

Rosenfeld, E. (2012). Mountain Dew’s ‘Dub the Dew’ Online Poll Goes Horribly Wrong | TIME.com. [online] TIME.com. Available at: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/14/mountain-dews-dub-the-dew-online-poll-goes-horribly-wrong/ [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].

Ryan, D. and Jones, C. (2017). Understanding digital marketing. 1st ed. Philadelphia, PA: Kogan Page Ltd, pp.19-22.

Thorpe, D. (2012). Face Thorpe on Twitter:. [online] Twitter. Available at: https://twitter.com/Arr/status/218760865778905089 [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].

Walmart (2012). Kodiak, Alaska Welcomes Pitbull. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NrllHwHq7w [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].

Walmart (2012). Meet Pitbull at Your Local Walmart!. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CUO_QiPbGk [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].

Wilson, M., Robson, K. and Botha, E. (2017). Crowdsourcing in a time of empowered stakeholders: Lessons from crowdsourcing campaigns. Business Horizons, 60(2), pp.247-253.

 

Protein World: A Lesson in Social Media Damage Control?

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Social media marketing, such as on Twitter, can provide an excellent opportunity for companies to directly engage with their audience, and react quickly and strongly to changing market dynamics. However, in some cases, when not handled correctly, it provides a platform for a company’s audience to publicly lambast them, and bring a great deal of embarrassment and damage to a brand. In this blog post, we are going to explore the case  of Protein World, and how they reacted to an overwhelmingly negative online conversation.

In the spring of 2015, Protein World (a supplier of workout supplements) unveiled their “Are You Beach Body Ready?” campaign, renting advertising space on billboards and trains, supplemented by postings on social media – most notably via Twitter. The campaign poster included a slender, toned, young woman donned in only a bikini, asking the audience a simple question – are you beach body ready?

Protein World’s controversial poster.

The objective of the campaign was rather obvious – to inspire and encourage the audience to get in shape for the summer using their supplements. What they didn’t anticipate was the combined backlash from the recently emerging “fat-acceptance” movement (SBS, 2014), and the angry and vocal fourth-wave feminists of Twitter (Cochrane, 2013), accusing the company of objectifying and body-shaming women in a “sexist” campaign.

Just a handful of the campaign’s angry responses.

The responses to the campaign shown above beg the question, how on Earth do you respond to such a scathing backlash? Do you remain silent, or do you try to mitigate the damage through a friendly PR filter? After all, at this point the nation was watching, with the majority of major news outlets in the UK covering the story. Well, in a move that would make many marketers cringe, Protein World did neither and instead went full-force, taking to arguing with and directly insulting their critics publicly on Twitter.

An example of the unconventional responses from Protein World.

This move served to contradictingly both comply with and completely subvert the findings outlined by Noort and Willemsen (2011), in which the key take-away was that companies can help to mitigate damage through responding quickly and directly to negative online conversations, while striving to “improve brand evaluations by showing that they take the problems of customers seriously”. But surprisingly, not taking customers seriously (but still taking the time to respond to them) appeared to work in their favour, with the company reportedly generating an additional £1 Million in sales as a result of the backlash (Brinded, 2015). But this raises a question difficult to answer – would they have been more successful if they hadn’t taken to insulting and marginalising a large section of the public?

To begin to answer that question, we must first ask what the KPIs of a social media campaign are. Blanchard (2011) makes the case that in a social media campaign, the performance indicators may differ depending on who is rating the campaign’s success. Marketers who focus on brand reputation may rate the success of a campaign through the amount of positive conversations in relation to the amount of negative ones, however, some marketing teams may take a numbers approach – the more shares, likes, and followers, the more successful the campaign is (Blanchard, 2011).

In relation to Protein World, if we are to take the latter approach and use a pure numbers perspective, using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (SocialBlade does not provide tracking for Protein World’s account) we are able to ascertain that between the 25th April 2015 when the controversy first hit, and the 28th April, the @ProteinWorld Twitter account gained an impressive 5,000 followers – increasing by another 5000 to a total of 70,000 by the beginning of June that year. In other words, in the 2 months following the campaign, they managed to increase their total number of Twitter followers by 13.24% – not too bad for what some would call a marketing blunder.

However, if we are to take the perspective of brand reputation in to account, the campaign could probably be described as an overwhelming disaster. With thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people insulted and distanced from the brand, with the combined might of the news media publishing scathing articles in relation to the controversy (Burrows, 2015), the campaign probably didn’t do Protein World’s reputation any good – yet the company is still operating, with more Twitter followers than ever before. So why is this the case?

This brings us to Hanna, Rohm, and Crittenden’s (2011) work. In their article, they provide 5 lessons in social media marketing – the final, and arguably most important, being “Be unique”. Their argument is that using authenticity and uniqueness gives consumers a reason to engage with the brand in the first place, which would explain why Protein World recieved the attention that they did, both positive and negative – but a least it was memorable. Would Protein World have been better off responding via Noort and Willemsen’s (2011) technique of “taking the problems of consumers seriously”, or implementing a more sensitive advertising campaign in the first place? We may never know, but it can certainly be said that the campaign made one hell of a memorable impact and helped make a name for a previously relatively obscure brand.

So did Protein World learn anything from the campaign? Did they ensure that their adverts were more sensitive and including of others? Well, no. They were back at it again with a new campaign the next year – featuring even more scantily-clad women than before (Cohen, 2016). But depending on who you ask, in an age where people are demanding more authenticity from public figures (Kanski, 2016), this type of PR may well continue to work in their favour.

For more on social media controversies, be sure to click here.

 

 

References:

Blanchard, O. (2011). Social media ROI. 1st ed. Indianapolis, Ind.: Que.

Brinded, L. (2015). Protein World makes £1 million immediately after the ‘Beach Body Ready’ campaign backlash. [online] Business Insider. Available at: http://uk.businessinsider.com/protein-world-makes-1-million-immediately-after-the-beach-body-ready-campaign-backlash-2015-4?r=US&IR=T [Accessed 28 Feb. 2017].

Burrows, T. (2015). ‘Beach body ready’ named as Britain’s WORST advert of 2015. [online] Mail Online. Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3356137/The-festive-turkeys-no-one-s-buying-Beach-body-ready-named-Britain-s-WORST-advert-2015-Kelly-Brook-Ferne-McCann-s-terrible-acting-not-far-behind.html [Accessed 28 Feb. 2017].

Cochrane, K. (2013). The fourth wave of feminism: meet the rebel women. [online] The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/fourth-wave-feminism-rebel-women [Accessed 28 Feb. 2017].

Cohen, C. (2016). Protein World is back with a new body shaming ad – and it’s more sexist than ever. [online] The Telegraph. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/protein-world-is-back-with-a-new-body-shaming-ad—and-its-more/ [Accessed 28 Feb. 2017].

Hanna, R., Rohm, A. and Crittenden, V. (2011). We’re all connected: The power of the social media ecosystem. Business Horizons, 54(3), pp.265-273.

Kanski, A. (2016). Change and authenticity: The messages that won over American voters. [online] Prweek.com. Available at: http://www.prweek.com/article/1415125/change-authenticity-messages-won-american-voters [Accessed 28 Feb. 2017].

Noort, G. and Willemsen, L. (2012). Online Damage Control: The Effects of Proactive Versus Reactive Webcare Interventions in Consumer-generated and Brand-generated Platforms. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 26(3), pp.131-140.

SBS. (2014). Fat pride: The growing movement of people looking for fat acceptance. [online] Available at: http://www.sbs.com.au/news/thefeed/story/fat-pride-growing-movement-people-looking-fat-acceptance [Accessed 28 Feb. 2017].