t-minus

I just spent the last 10 minutes reading post after post on Chipotle’s facebook wall about an employee killing a cat. The controversy is pretty stupid. An employee accidentally hits and kills a cat in her car…then posts about it on facebook. The problem? She shows no remorse, and compares it to a killing a mosquito. Still..far from newsworthy. But somehow (through digg or reddit is my guess) it starts to spread that she was a Chipotle employee which of course means that Chipotle hates cats unless they fire her.

Now, Chipotle has a combination of cat-lovers and meme-lovers posting on their wall. So what do they do? Chipotle overreacts and posts on their wall. This is mistake #1. Until this point, only a very vocal minority knew anything about this. But their post could be viewed by everyone who had liked Chipotle’s page…all 1,114,692 of them. Mistake #2 was trying to brush the whole thing under the rug by posting that her account was hacked and she never actually posted anything about killing a cat. This motivates all the nerds in the world to prove that this wasn’t the case (which they did) and fuels the fire for people to continue posting on their wall.

So now people are competing to see who has the wittiest post on Chipotle’s facebook page involving a.) Chipote and b.) cats. So far, people are posting things like Chipotle-themed LOLCAT pictures, but it’s only a matter of time before we see a sad Keanu eating a cat wrapped in a Chipotle wrapper. Honestly, it’s kind of funny. But you know the people at Chipotle (especially the ones in Marketing & PR) are freaking out.

What they should do is write one post about how much they love cats. Not an official corporate announcement…but something stupid and over the top. Something like, “Here at Chipotle, we love all animals. But we really like cats. To prove it, on December 14 we’re giving away a free burrito to the first 10,000 people who bring their cats into a Chipotle location.”

Done. PR is easy.