Chipotle - Blog# 7

Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. is multinational company running a chain of restaurants in the US, UK, Canada, Germany and France among other developed countries. It services fall in the hospitality and catering industry and specializes in burritos and tacos as food delicacies whose origin is Mexico. The company has been using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to interact with its clients and popularize its services on these social platforms. However, on July 2013, Chipotle intentionally fooled Twitter users by creating an impression that its Twitter account had been hacked. The company ran a stream of tweets on this platform, which confused its followers and other users of Twitter some of which seemed to indicate that an unknown individual was misusing their account. One of the tweets read, “Hi sweetie, can you please pick up some lime, salt and onions? Twitter” (ARC Co., 2013).

Chipotle later admitted that it had deliberately forged the hacking incidence as part of their unexpected campaign, which sought to popularize the chain restaurants. Many Twitter users were annoyed by the incidence terming it as online social interference. It was unethical and unprofessional to create such an impression aiming to find more followers (Bruce & German, 2011) The incidence indicated poor understanding of the professional ethics in when using social sites such as posting indecent photos, untruthful comments and making false statements in with the aim of catching user’s attention (Rogerson & Gotterbarn, 2014). While no legal action was taken for Chipotle’s actions, many people felt that advertisement or campaigns should have been publicized first. It would be fair if the company announced the start of an advertising campaign and specify the duration to avoid online social infringement and negative response from existing and potential clients.

 References

ARC Co. (2013). Social Justice: Chipotle’s Pathetic Misuse of Social Media. Retrieved: 18/9/2014 from http://arcompany.co/social-justice-chipotles-pathetic-misuse-of-social-media/

Bruce, D. & German, K. (2011). The Ethics of Emerging Media: Information, Social Norms, and New Media Technology, New Jersey, NJ: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Rogerson, S. & Gotterbarn, D. The Ethics of Software Project Management. Retrieved: 18/9/2014 from http://www.ccsr.cse.dmu.ac.uk/staff/Srog/teaching/sweden.htm