Jake Hughes
The Paw Print
You can always rely on mega fast food chain, McDonalds, to provide material to scrutinize and discuss in terms of public relations. A company such as McDonalds pays particular attention to public relations as it is already in the public eye because of the market it occupies. The reason I picked this particular campaign is because it was so unsuccessful and poorly managed that it has to be up there with the worst of them.
This particular campaign took place on January 2012 and was an instant failure. The idea of this campaign was to promote an ideology that McDonalds only uses the freshest produce, to introduce its customers to actual McDonalds’ farmers, and also allowing customers to tell their personal stories involving McDonalds. McD’s chose twitter to broadcast its message by opening up the chat to the public with hashtags such as #Meetthefarmers and, later on in the same day, #McDstories.
McD didn’t think it through very well when they decided to use the very vague and open ended hashtag #McDstories. This particular hashtag drew unwanted attention and stories that were a real problem for the fast food company.
Customers took advantage of this open ended hashtag question and stated exactly what was on their minds. Customers began sharing disgusting stories of finding finger nails in burgers, customers being hospitalized with food poison, and former employees loosing obscene amounts of weight after leaving McD’s. Other people started sharing other hashtags on the same feed that directed them to other scrutinizing topics involving McD’s like #McCruelty, which involved McDonald’s using pigs from gestation crates.
However, although McDonalds failed with the hashtag #McDstories, the other was very successful. But, McD’s removed the hashtag #McDstories within two hours of it being promoted because of its failure; yet, McDonalds had a contingency plan that saved this particular issue from developing into a massacre. They removed the feed from twitter, although it was a little too late as the media had already taken advantage of the comments and kept the subject in the headlines for a week or so after.
Nevertheless, McDonald’s social media director, Rick Wion, promptly wrote a statement addressing the issue and played down the comments saying, “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.”
In conclusion, the PR campaign was a failure as it drew unwanted and unsatisfactory attention to the fast food chain. However, they reacted in the correct way by issuing a statement from a director at McDonalds that addressed the issue and tried to justify the poor comments.
What’s Been Said…