Thursday, January 26, 2012

McDonald's Twitter Campaign Goes Horribly Wrong #McDStories

In many posts through my blog i've shared my opinions of how important is nowadays the use of web based platforms by the company's to communicate with their consumers and also how only now these platforms like Facebook or Twitter are starting to be well managed for those purposes. 
Anyways, like every other means of communication, things can go wrong and there should always be a backup plan for the possibility of backfire.
Check it out:
A twitter campaign by McDonald's backfired when people started sharing the wrong kind of #McDStories (via @bored2tears).
McDonald's kicked things off on Thursday with the hashtag #MeetTheFarmers, in a campaign meant to draw attention to the brand's guarantee of fresh produce.
Later in the day, however, the burger company used a dangerously vague hashtag: "When u make something w/ pride, people can taste it," McD potato supplier #McDstories
People took this hashtag and started talking trash. The Daily Mail gathered some of the best:

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UPDATE: Here's an emailed statement from McDonald's social media director Rick Wion:
Last Thursday, we planned to use two different hashtags during a promoted trend – #meetthefarmers and #mcdstories.
While #meetthefarmers was used for the majority of the day and successful in raising awareness of the Supplier Stories campaign, #mcdstories did not go as planned. We quickly pulled #mcdstories and it was promoted for less than two hours.
Within an hour of pulling #McDStories the number of conversations about it fell off from a peak of 1600 to a few dozen. It is also important to keep those numbers in perspective. There were 72,788 mentions of McDonald's overall that day so the traction of #McDStories was a tiny percentage (2%) of that.
With all social media campaigns, we include contingency plans should the conversation not go as planned. The ability to change midstream helped this small blip from becoming something larger.

Source: Business Insider

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