This is perhaps one of the biggest social media fail stories ever
recorded. Many brands
use digital now days to advertise and get thoughts of customer’s opinions. McDonalds
as an example have used this but failed.
Promoting a #hashtag campaign called #McDstories. This
backfired as customers were certainly not loving it! The
fast-food giants jumping on the social media bandwagon had a major deflect on
their brand with ruthless stories about the public’s experience.
These horror stories made such an impact that McDonalds
initially made new hashtag #MeetTheFarmers, This then promotes the
corporation’s guarantee of fresh produce, concentrated on wholesome stories
about farmers instead of consumers horror stories.
McDonald’s
said “The company had to switch course in the middle of the promotion, pulling
the #McDStorieshashtag and going back to the earlier, less inflammatory one.
“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,”
said Rick Wion, social media director for McDonald’s, noting that the
#McDStories tweets made up just 2 percent of messages about McDonalds that day
on Twitter.”
This latest failure is bad news for free-to-use Twitter, which is
still trying to show its investors that it can make a profit by allowing
corporations to sponsor accounts or pay for "promoted" material.
McDonald's is only the latest company to have seen this backfire. Similar attempts
to generate good publicity via Twitter have recently gone awry for Wendy's
fast-food chain and the airline Qantas, although Twitter
said last week it had generated
advertising revenues of $150m in 2011.
I have no idea what McDonalds Social Media Team was thinking when they
decided to run this campaign. A simple brand analysis on Twitter (for brand
mentions) would have told them that the brand sentiment was mixed, and skewed
towards negative. Promoting a vague hashtag like #McDStories would bring out
both the positives and the critics. This is a simple case of a brand NOT
understanding their audience on social media.
Advertising in a digital sense marketing
communications didn’t work for Mcdonalds as they shouldn’t use digital
advertising if they can’t control consumer interaction taking from in store
experiences as more people are likely to talk about bad experiences than good
experiences. McDonalds doesn’t have good digital strategies which have been
proven that consumers have more power now days. It still gives McDonalds a
vehicle to improve. There lesson has been leant!
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