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Ruh roh! Burger King’s Facebook app/social media marketing bombshell, Whopper Sacrifice, was just as popular as we thought it would be. It managed to get Facebook users to ditch almost a quarter of a million of their friends in the course of one week. All for the sake of getting a free Whopper. Then Facebook pulled the plug.

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What!???? One of the big guns of advertising jumps into Facebook with what can only be called a resounding succes in mutual benefit social marketing and they pull the plug. Ridiculous. Full story at TechCrunch.

Burger King Facebook Campaign - Whopper Sacrifice

Burger King’s new Facebook app rewards you with a free Whopper coupon when you get rid of 10 friends. The campaign is Whopper Sacrifice and it smartly taps into one of the largest problems social networkers face over time: friend creep. If you want to ditch that guy you hung with for 6 hours at your college orientation weekend the time is now; you’ll receive a delicious fat-filled flame-grilled sodium-bomb from America’s perpetual #2 burger joint for your efforts. This is a truly brilliant use of social media marketing via mutual benefit. Burger King is getting Facebookers to try their product and expose their friend list to the Burger King brand. In exchange, they help them fight friend creep in a way that is humorous and rewarding.

Be warned though. The friends you sacrifice will know it was for a Whopper…

Burger King Facebook App - Whopper Sacrifice

I don’t know when this new Facebook App launched, but when I started writing this post, 30 minutes ago, the counter on the App’s site showed 13,150 friends had been sacrificed. In the time since, it has jumped 16% to 15,260. Looks like a hit to me. How high will the flames go?