Crunchy Details of the CTC scandal from a Social Media Manager perspective

5 min readMar 24, 2021

Huge disclaimer up front: I don’t manage responses for my current company, I create content — but have managed both at past companies. Other disclaimer: obviously these opinions are only mine, etc. etc.

If you’re on Twitter, you know the crunchy details of the drama yesterday between Jensen Karp and Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

If you aren’t: Karp, an L.A.-based writer, discovered shrimp tails in his box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and was kind enough to document the journey, seatbelts to the lab and all. What am I talking about? Here we go…

Upon discovering alleged (CYA here) crustacean tails in his box of cinnamon-coated squares, Jensen tweeted at 1:32P. Score: 9.5/10. I don’t know how to improve upon the simplicity aside from adding a period at the end, but am hesitant to give a 10 out of the gate.

By 2:39P, CTC replied with the following: Score: 7/10. Social queues are much longer than most people realize, and teams need to sort through a long list of replies, mentions, quote tweets, complaints about completely unrelated items (see bonus @ bottom), etc. This is just a bit too cheery for me, but not bad. Realize that complaint templates often exist that are pretty generic, so we can’t fault CTC too much right up front.

OK, we’re skipping several here & there, as this is a lengthy saga.

Karp agreed to send the shrimp and box back to CTC so they could prove it wasn’t sugar (strange conclusion for them), but wanted to keep one himself as proof. Fair enough. The social team has to remain professional, but could be a bit more conversational here. However, remember how much scrutiny this is all getting now. CTC Score: 8/10. Minus 1.5 for the follow-up tweet that he is asked to be home for a three-hour window. CTC gave a few options and is trying to make things easy — who’s not home most of the time now? I don’t know his life, which is why I give Karp Score: 8.5.

PR statement above. Social and PR/Communications work together closely, so this would be a joint effort. CTC Score: 7/10. No logo needed, we’re all invested — plus, the tweet is coming from the brand account. They used a Twitter Card vs regular text to draw attention to this tweet, as it was gaining popularity as the story continued. Can’t expect much more from a Legal-approved PR statement on social. Karp Score: 7/10. I get the humor attempt, but the brand has to remain professional and alert customers of their options.

Look at these numbers — 568 comments, 3.5K people sharing this, almost 100K likes, and the story started trending about now. Simple, seatbelt, success. We’re all in the car with you, Jensen. Karp Score: 9.5/10.

CTC wisely moved to email. A balance needs to exist of awareness to other customers and support, but this should not be played out on social media. Crisis comms, under which this arguably falls, is a delicate act.

CTC Score: 5/10. Points for moving to email, but deductions for the messaging style and having a social media specialist relay it. This should have moved to the Complaints department, working with Legal.

Karp score: 7/10. He’s a writer, so I appreciate the style, but again — he’s conversing with a social media specialist who is undoubtedly receiving direction from at least 3 people each in PR/Communications, Legal, Social… this is a logistical mess since it wasn’t routed immediately to Complaints/Legal.

Everyone is still pretty much Team Karp at this point, right? Even though he hasn’t scored all 10s, his writing style made this entertaining, if a bit cringe when we remember poor Maria trying to navigate handling these responses with 87 people providing direction.

Here’s where he lost me — and a lot of others. You’re good at memes? (Well yes actually, but so are most people these days.) Score: 4/10. He was trying to be genuinely supportive, I think, but as Twitter user @UpstateAshley wrote: “Way to insult an entire *profession* populated by brand, marketing and crisis management experts.” We can take a joke, even when we can’t make them on our brand handles (we can’t all be Wendy’s), but this was cringe-inducing.

To echo Tyra Banks: I was rooting for you, we were all rooting for you! How dare you?!