Barry got a flyer for a cool new social media promotion at Wendy’s. It looks fun and simple enough: just take a picture of your chicken sandwich and tweet it with a specific hashtag. He writes that what should be a simple enough promo became needlessly complicated because of two mistakes on the part of Wendy’s: they handed flyers out two weeks before the actual start date of the promotion, and directed people to the wrong Twitter account. You know, minor details.

Barry wasn’t the only one who tweeted at the right hashtag at the wrong time. Which isn’t the only problem with this promo: the flyer he got told customers to put an apostrophe in the chain’s Twitter handle. Doing that sends their tweet instead to a nice Canadian lady named @Wendy, who presumably got a lot of questions about fast food. Until this afternoon, when she lent her account to Wendy’s for what looks like the duration of the promo.

Drove through Wendy’s tonight and was handed a flyer for their new #twEATfor1K promotion. Seems simple enough, take a photo of my flatbread chicken sandwich, tweet it to @Wendy’s using #twEATfor1K, win cash!

Of course, in order to take said picture I have to do it in the car before I eat my meal and I proceeded to Tweet said pic without reading the fine print which says the promotion doesn’t begin until April 1.

Perhaps you have already figured out the biggest flaw in the promotion. Tweeting to @Wendy’s will not connect with the restaurant chain, it will connect with Wendy Peters of Calgary, Alberta. I suspect the Wendy’s marketing department started out with the correct handle, @Wendys, but some branding [stickler] swooped in at the last second and made corrections that went unnoticed.

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