McDonald’s just didn’t think things through, some say, when they embarked on their recent #MeetTheFarmers and #McDStories Twitter campaigns.
It definitely was not what McDonald’s had planned their ambitious Twitter campaign to be.
Attempting to promote its use of fresh produce, the world’s leading burger chain introduced hashtags to promote the fact that McDonald’s buys it’s fresh produce from farmers. Initially, the company introduced #MeetTheFarmers and, later, #McDStories. Of course, the company expected that it would hear good stories, but that’s not at all how the tweets went.
As the tweets piled up, they contained stories of food poisoning, foreign objects in the food and massive weight-loss by not eating McDonald’s foods—not exactly what McDonald’s had been hoping to hear. According to an email statement received by Business Insider, McDonald’s social media director Rick Wion claimed that the actual number of negative tweets was small:
“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.”
The media, according to Wion, is guilty of making the event into something of interest. “The only reason it is in the press is because many outlets are ignoring the significance — or in this case the insignificance — of the stats about the promoted trend in favor of provocative and tweetable headlines,” Wion said, CBS News reported.
The problem with the attempt at this kind of media campaign, Jason Falls with SocialMediaExplorer.com explained to CBS News, is that McDonald’s failed to look at its company’s image in the public honestly.
“Walk up to any random person in the U.S. (or world for that matter) and say, ‘Did you know that McDonald’s uses farm-fresh meats?’ and they would probably laugh at you and call you nuts. Whether it’s true or not is irrelevant. McDonald’s in this case had no idea what their true perception in the marketplace was. They didn’t see their brand the way consumers did. So when they tried to portray their brand as something it wasn’t, at least from a perception standpoint, they got dinged.”
It is also likely that the company did not take into consideration the “typical Twitter user,” John Furnari, vice-president of social and digital media at Blitz, added. “They were picturing some wholesome American family talking about memorable moments in their lives going as a group to get a burger,” Furnari said. “In truth though, is that your typical Twitter user?”
Following the fiasco of the aborted McDonald’s Twitter campaign, two things are likely: (1) Other companies will look, listen and learn from the mistakes made by the burger giant and (2) McDonald’s is unlikely to seek such a wide-open format for stories of consumer interactions again anytime soon.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
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Article source: http://www.huliq.com/10473/mcdonalds-twitter-campaign-not-textbook-marketing-strategy
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