Oh dear, looks like someone forgot how to send a private message on Twitter… Or did they?
Actor and comedian Rainn Wilson – star of the hit US TV show ‘The Office’ – has ended up in a bit of a spicy situation after what he thought was a DM sent to his assistant turned out to be a very public tweet. Rainn Wilson’s Twitter timeline appears to show him telling his assistant that he’ll accept an offer to promote American fast food chain Del Taco, despite not being too fond of them. Following this was an apology for the not-so-private message and then a promotion for the tacos.
His timeline looked a little like this:
At face value, it looks like he genuinely made a mistake. However, given the fact that this story is now being posted to numerous different social media/tech sites, the Del Taco brand has gained more column inches than it would have originally hoped for from just being tweeted about by a well-known actor on Twitter. Was this an honest mistake by the Rainn Wilson, or was this the plan all along? As they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and $12,000 does seem like an awful lot of money to spend on getting one person to tweet about a product. Your guess is as good as mine.
This is very hard to tell. But I’d say both he and the brand, got much more out of this than they would have done if Rainn Wilson had stuck to what we are supposed to believe was the plan.
Sophie Hobson, deputy editor, LondonlovesBusiness
It’s hard to tell with Rainn Wilson. I saw this yesterday and having been following his Twitter account for a while this doesn’t seem out of character at all. If I were a gambling man I’d wager this came out exactly as he wanted it to. You are absolutely right though about the coverage, it’s definitely gotten A LOT of attention.
Michael Girard
Community Engagement, Radian6
Hi Michael,
Thank you for taking the time to read the blog and leave a comment. Having done a little digging around this story and the subsquent Twit-frenzy (admittedly perpetuated by folks like us!), I get the feeling that the whole thing was planned. The amount of people talking about it on Twitter and the wider online community is astonishing.
There are a couple of things that just don’t add up if this were to be a legitimate mistake… Why would he be so derogatory about the brand, but ‘@’ at the same time? And why would he remember to ‘@’ Del Taco, but not his assistant? All smacks of publicity stunt to me. Having said that, the story got me to go onto the Del Taco site, and I spent the whole morning craving a taco or burrito – just a shame that I’m in leafy Surrey, and nowhere near a Del Taco restaurant!
So what’s your final verdict?
– Andrew