Power to the People!

Who controls your brand? Your marketing team? Your board of directors?

Nope. Your customers do. Or, in this case, your former customers do.

McDonalds tried a twitter based promotion telling the stories of farmers and suppliers in the McD’s food chain using the hashtag #McDstories. Yes, I meant that pun and I’m not sorry. It did not go as planned.

Pretty quickly, #McDstories was hijacked and thrown WAY off track into the deep negative that is the internet. Horror stories featuring poor experiences and even worse opinions of the fast food giant were quickly the top tweets. Read more and possibly decide never to “dine” there again here.

Moral? Well, first off, any nutritionist will tell you that McDonalds isn’t good for you, and over the recent years, more people are realizing this as well. McDonalds wasn’t really paying attention to the things that were probably already being said about them online, so when they jumped in to control the conversation with this campaign, they did so wearing some seriously thick rose glasses.

Marketing and social media can’t fix product or customer service problems…

…and fresh from the farm isn’t really what I think about when I think of McDonalds…

24 January 2012 ·

• Tags
• Social media
• twitter
• McDonalds
• marketing
• branding
• strategy