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Wendy’s Twitter Is Back On Their Bullshit

By February 2, 2018

I have a friend whose primary function at his job is to pretend to be a dog on Twitter. This is 100% true. He runs the social media account for a brand that has a dog for a mascot, so he has to tweet as if he were a dog. This is how brands advertise now, by running social media accounts and pretending to be your friend so you’ll have a good opinion of them when it’s time to consume.

Wendy’s is pretty famous for this. They’re the stars of the most-retweeted tweet of all time, which is some kid asking for free chicken nuggets. Which I know is what I dreamed of when I thought about the promises of the information age as a kid reading Willaim Gibson’s Neuromancer. I guess it isn’t like cyberpunk stories didn’t warn us that the world was going to be ruled by like, five mega-corporations that have swallowed up all their competition until they were powerful enough to subjugate humanity. I guess I was just hoping they’d make fewer dad jokes while they were doing it.

You may remember a while ago a McDonald’s employee was fired after tweeting some really gross pictures from their soft-serve machine. Wendy’s remembers, and their social media team is still making subtle Twitter jabs about it.

They also tweeted this.

Apparently the lesson they learned from that time a tweet challenging their “fresh, never frozen” slogan went viral was that being an asshole on social media gets press. So that’s what Wendy’s brand is now, at least on Twitter: The fast food company run by assholes.

But they’re still a wider brand, so they’ll have tweets about Dave Thomas and what a genuinely nice guy he was, like this:

Juxtaposed against tweets like this:

Wendy’s tweets are generally pretty safe. They seem interesting because you’re not expecting a fast food Twitter account to act like Regina George, but their tweets mainly fall into one of two categories: McDonald’s and Burger King Freeze their food or McDonald’s ice cream machines don’t work.

While others may pile kudos on Wendy’s for their grumpy social media approach, I’m going to give the win here to Steak-Umm for their Twitter strategy of just owning random nonsense.

I don’t even know what that means.

“Beef sheets” is a weird thing to call your product, but I suppose it’s better than beef curtains.

Oh, yeah, Steak-Umm has a secondary account that’s supposed to be an intern who isn’t ready for the responsibility of tweeting from their main Steak-Umm account. Because this is too much to handle.

Wendy’s can keep their “loveable troll” strategy, because I’m now all about the “paranoid schizophrenic detached from reality and living in a world of Lovecraftian horror of it’s own design” strategy Steak-Umm is rolling with.

[Image: Mike Mozart]

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