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The Week Of Twitter Hacks Continues, Although Some Are Self-Inflicted

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Turns out Burger King wasn’t the only major brand to have its Twitter account hacked this week. Yesterday the account belonging to the American vehicle brand Jeep was hijacked in a very similar attack to the one inflicted upon Burger King.

A series of tweets was unleashed, with the perpetrators jokingly announcing that the brand had been sold to rival firm Cadillac. When the Burger King was de-throned earlier in the week, the pretenders to the crown tweeted to say that McDonald’s had purchased the fast-food chain, and the account’s avatar and background picture were changed to display the McDonald’s logo and other promotional images.

With Jeep’s images, its icon was changed to the Cadillac badge and the background picture replaced with a picture of a clapped out sedan painted with McDonald’s logos and brand colours. In the same way that McDonald’s were quick to point out that they had nothing to do with the Burger King hack, Cadillac extended a similar olive branch to Jeep:

Burger King also tweeted its sympathies to Jeep, and judging by the nature of the response, the car giant – or at least its Marketing/PR department – seems to have been able to see the humour in the whole escapade:

Just to make things a little more bizarre, some other brands were apparently so jealous of the exposure gained by Burger King and Jeep, that they decided to ‘hack’ themselves. Yup, MTV posted tweets from its own account that poked fun at certain musicians, in an attempt to publicise itself and its affiliate networks.

An MTV spokesman told TechCrunch “the hack was pre-planned in the spirit of corporate camaraderie with our sister network, BET [Black Entertainment Television]”. However, the reaction was less that positive for MTV, with many users heckling the music reality TV channel for performing the marketing equivalent of jumping the shark.

In an ironic twist of fate, Denny’s Diner managed to gain more social kudos and exposure after its tweet lambasting the actions of MTV went viral:

What do you make of all this hacking? With Twitter in the process of rolling out an advertising API this week, will the apparently ease with which two household names have had their accounts hijacked caused companies to think twice before investing time and money on the micro-blogging site?

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