From the so-bizarre-it-has-to-be-true department: Chipotle has admitted that what looked like a case of its Twitter account being hacked was actually part of a current promotion.
It happened on Sunday when, during the course of about one hour, @ChipotleTweets sent out a stream of bizarre tweets that finally ended with a confession that “we had a little problem with our account.”
Now, Chris Arnold, Chipotle’s communications director, tells Mashable that “it was definitely thought out: We didn’t want it to be harmful or hateful or controversial.”
It was basically a ruse, he says, part of the company’s 20th anniversary “Adventurito” promotion, which involves customers trying to solve puzzles.
We thought that it really fit well within the context of our 20th anniversary promotion where we were putting clues in all sorts of things,” Arnold said. “We had clues pop up in a lot of places and thought that incorporating something into our social media presence would fit well into that promotion.
If nothing else, the stunt seems to have helped with Chipotle’s vanity metrics. Arnold says the restaurant added about 4,000 new followers on Sunday, compared to about 250 on a normal day, and the tweets were retweeted about 12,000 times, compared to about 75 per day normally.
Earlier this year, MTV pulled a similar Twitter stunt when it pretended to be hacked a day after Burger King’s and Jeep’s Twitter accounts were really hacked.
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