Pepsi India: Ye Facebook Contest Hai Boss, Tameez Se Nahi Khela Jaata

If I had a dime every time a brand violated Facebook's page guidelines to organize a contest, I would have amassed enough wealth to buyout Facebook and close it down forever.

But alas! I don't get a dime and brands keep violating Facebook's rules.

Continuing the tradition of not giving a rat's ass about the rules is Pepsi India which, in it's giggly excitement to pimp NH7 Weekender, was too lazy to create a separate 3rd party app tab and instead went ahead and organized it on its wall.

I wouldn't have minded an inexperienced brand / agency doing this, but Pepsi India??!!

Not only this, the contest itself was the kind of thing that spammers have wet dreams of.

To win free tickets to the NH7 Weekender, Pepsi asks you to tag them in your status update and your friends as well and tell the world why you want to be at the NH7 Weekender.

There are better ways to make your contest go viral than asking people to tag their friends in statuses. Thank god none of my friends who have liked Pepsi India took part in the contest and spammed my news feed, I would have unfriended them right away.

And Facebook clearly states in its page guidelines that:

You must not condition registration or entry upon the user taking any action using any Facebook features or functionality other than liking a Page, checking in to a Place, or connecting to your app.

And, 2 violations for a day were not enough, they went ahead and updated their cover photo which screamed of a Call-to-Action for their Dubstation.

Again quoting Facebook's page guidelines:

Covers may not include: .... calls to action, such as "Get it now" or "Tell your friends."

You expect a certain level of maturity from big brands and look up to them to pave way for the rest of the community. But this is way more disappointing than disappointment can be.

Hope the social media guys at Pepsi India wisen up and be more responsible.

PS: Hat tip to Rhea Malik for informing us over Twitter about Pepsi India's activities. If you come across any such violations by brands, do let us know. We would love to cover it. Together, we will clean up the messy Indian social media ecosystem.

Update (17th October):

Seems like Pepsi India has gotten into a habit of committing mistakes. Everyone who loves music knows that Enrique performed in Pune last night. But this what they had to share with their Facebook fans today:

Looks like the image was to go out yesterday. Bad scheduling? May be.

Oh and while we are at it, can we have some Grammar Nazis over here to correct the update?