United Airlines Tried To Capitalize On The Wendy's Chicken Nugget Tweets And Failed So Hard

Joanna Fantozzi|

By now, we all know about the modern-day social media hero named Carter Wilkerson — the Nevada teenager who epically asked Wendy's for free chicken nuggets for a year and was told to surpass 18 million retweets to receive his prize.

Wilkerson didn't quite reach his goal, but with a little help from Ellen DeGeneres, he did break the record for the greatest number of retweets (3.4 million and counting) in Twitter history, so Wendy's gamely honored the deal anyway.

All's well that ends well, right? United Airlines tried to ride on the coattails of this social media success (perhaps looking for some ramped-up positive publicity) and were trolled by skeptical Twitter users. Come on, United: Don't you know the law of diminishing returns?

It ended up being yet another public relations misstep for a company that has been dragged through the mud quite a bit since the April 2017 incident where a doctor was unwillingly dragged off an overbooked United Airlines flight.

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