I'm rather fond of McDonald's as a company. My first job aged 16 was with them - I survived the whole of the first day so I got all five stars! They were a good company to work for in 1984 and I think they have undertaken some excellent repositioning and communications work in the last ten years too.
In this social media age, many companies rightly seek a dialogue with their customers and try to tell real 'people' stories to show the human face of the corporation. But there is danger too as the massive amount of coverage of McDonald's cock-up last week from the likes of the Daily Mail to the Huffingfton Post and the bloggersphere demonstrates:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/9034883/McDonalds-McDStories-Twitter-campaign-backfires.html
Having critics hijack your hashtag isn't new of course but McDonald's apparent naivety is interesting. Theirs was a 24-hour campaign to insert paid promoted tweets into the streams of Twitter users. Promoting your tweet exposes you to everyone, not just your supporters, making it more likely to attract unwanted attention.
Generating a response from the large number of critics who will never credit McDonalds's for anything shouldn't have surprised them. But within two hours, the company pulled #McDStories, saying that the effort "did not go as planned. It was negative enough that we set about a change of course"!
Did they not have someone monitoring their Twitter account 24/7 who could respond to and engage with criticisms and so dispel myth and counter negatives? That requires a person with knowledge, authority and communication skills - not that week's work experience person.
key lessons?
- have a meaningful objective for your social media engagement
- plan carefully
- resource it properly
- have a plan 'B' for if things go wrong
Andrew Caesar-Gordon
UPDATE 26th January
Here's an emailed statement from McDonald's social media director, Rick Wion:
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.
