Chick-fil-A pretends to be a girl for PR reasons, is caught

This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time.  H/t to George Takei for posting it.  Chick-fil-A has been horrific to gay people for a long time, I am glad that they’ve finally been outspoken enough about it to cause everyday people to start protesting.

The story is this: the founder’s son/COO said CFA money was going to fight gay marriage so Jim Henson announced they would not partner with Chick-fil-A in the future.  Chick-fil-A suddenly discovered that the Muppet toys they were giving out were defective and announced they would no longer be giving them out.  Obviously, many people think that they dropped the toys because Jim Henson called them on being homo-haters, but Chick-fil-A is sticking to its story… an making up fake Facebook accounts to do the dirty work for them.

“Abby Farle” is a FB account created by Chick-fil-A to promote the lie that the toys had been removed weeks ago.  I guess the logic being that if someone who isn’t the store makes a claim that is untrue, no one can be mad at the company for lying.

Except social media under the scrutiny of tens of thousands of people is not the best place to use easily found stock photos as your head shot or to start a profile only a few hours ahead of when you post to a company’s website.  Especially if that’s the only thing the fake account does.

So, not only did CFA create a profile to enable them to lie, they made her super Christian, and they didn’t make her convincingly.  CFA was caught in the act 2 hours after they began the lie.  The internet is sometimes a beautiful thing, but companies are sometimes incredibly stupid at what they think they can get away with.

Dear everyone, when you get caught doing something bad, just admit it, because then it won’t be a story.  This?  This is a story.

BUAHAHAHA

UPDATE: Here is screencap of the stockphoto for those who think it isn’t the same girl:

UPDATE2: Personal message to Chick-fil-A

Chick-fil-A pretends to be a girl for PR reasons, is caught
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Facebook Rumors: Paying to reach fans

In my other life, I write for a social media news blog, and I recently wrote about the current rumor going around about pages/celebrities having to pay to reach their fans.  Unfortunately, my tiny blog post didn’t reach George Takei so I imagine the level of hysteria over this is just going to continue ratcheting up.  I’m sure you will all be surprised by this, but misinformation really gets under my skin.  Here’s the relevant information from Facebook itself:

Nothing has changed about how your posts are shared with the people who like your Page.

A lot of activity happens on Facebook and most people only see some of it in their news feeds. They may miss things when they’re not on Facebook, or they may have a lot of friends and Pages, which results in too much activity to show all of it in their news feed.

If you don’t promote your post, many of the people connected to your Page may still see it. However, by promoting a post, you’re increasing its potential reach so an even larger percentage of your Page audience and the friends of those interacting with your post will see it.

Nothing has changed, Facebook is just now offering the opportunity to advertize specific posts to the people most likely to be interested: casual fans who don’t interact with the page often and friends of fans.  If you have a problem with EdgeRank, the system that sorts your Newsfeed in Facebook, that’s a different issue entirely that impacts every post from every person, not just pages.

Facebook Rumors: Paying to reach fans