KFC Made This For The Guy Who Noticed They Only Follow 11 Herbs And Spices On Twitter

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Hey, remember that guy who noticed that KFC's Twitter account only followed 11 people, either Spice Girls or guys named Herb?

You know, 11 Herbs and Spices? That was Mike Edgette's claim to fame. Dude's tweet went viral, with more than 715,000 likes and 322,000 retweets.

KFC sure noticed, and they weren't even mad that one of their secrets got out.

In fact, they started looking for ways to reward Mike for his huge tweet, including adding him and endorsing his social networking abilities on LinkedIn. 

But that wasn't everything, not by a long shot. No, Mike's heroics earned him an epic, one-of-a-kind painting of him riding piggyback with Colonel Sanders and holding a drumstick as they stroll through a rugged landscape.

I think we can all agree that this is way, way better than a LinkedIn endorsement.

Along with the painting, Mike got a personalized letter signed by the Colonel (or at least his social media team in disguise) and a box of 52 $5 gift cards.

So naturally Mike posted his awesome gifts online. Who wouldn't want to share this glorious bounty with the world? But because the internet is the internet, things happened. It was like The Twilight Zone meets X-Files meets greasy Southern cooking.

It didn't take long for Mike's post to make its way to Reddit, where a few users started speculating that there was more to Mike's story than meets the eye.

They thought it was all an elaborate publicity stunt orchestrated by KFC and Mike's employer, TallGrass Public Relations, with Mike planted to "discover" who KFC's Twitter follows — as if nobody else could ever have noticed it either.

People also pointed to the ad firm Wieden+Kennedy as the architects of this viral stunt.

For his part, Mike denied any association with Wieden+Kennedy or KFC.

And Wieden+Kennedy has definitely been working with KFC on some campaigns, but if they're actually behind this stunt, they sure haven't taken credit for it yet.

And ad companies do like to take credit for their work. 

But what do you think? Is it all some public relations conspiracy, or do the tweet and the painting make a genuine, amazing exchange?