McDonald’s admits Twitter campaign was McFail
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McDonald’s has admitted a social media campaign went awry after pulling activity that was ambushed by detractors leaving negative comments.
The brand used Twitter’s fledgling promoted hashtag ad platform to rally fans and encourage them to share positive stories about McDonald’s experiences using the hashtag #McDStories.
The campaign, however, backfired when critics such a animal rights group PETA started using the hashtag to raise issues with McDonald’s practices and unhappy customers used it to slam the restaurant chain and share negative stories.
Rick Wion, McDonald’s social media director, says: “Within an hour, we saw that it wasn’t going as planned. It was negative enough that we set about a change of course. 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.”
McDonald’s yesterday (24 January) reported that total revenue reached $27bn (£17.3bn) last year, up 8% o the previous year while global sales increased 5.6%.
The UK, France, Russia and Germany led growth in Europe during the year.
Readers' comments (4)
Caroline Boots | Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:35 am
Reading about this it struck me that McDonalds didn't think through the likely response to their call to action in this Twitter campaign. They could have come up with a social media campaign that didn't open up such a can of worms.
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Emma | Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:10 pm
Does anyone know how exactly they managed steer away from the negative comments?
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Andrea Griffiths | Wed, 25 Jan 2012 1:09 pm
If the problems were spotted 'within an hour', then perhaps McDonald's should include contingency plans to address the issues being raised by unhappy customers, rather than shifting tack from something they see as a 'small blip' (implying minor issue). If I was an unhappy customer then I would find that implication quite an insult.
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James Trezona | Wed, 25 Jan 2012 3:41 pm
Stating that conversations are "planned" rather detracts from their value, both to the consumer and the brand. McDonalds has striven to become more authentic, but this sets that brand evolution back, even though PETA cannot claim a representative consumer voice.
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