Twitter - not sure McDonald's is ‘loving it’

The hashtag has quite literally become a bashtag for McDonald’s after its #McDStories backfired with many disillusioned customers choosing to use the opportunity to criticise the fast food giant.

At the heart of the Twitter campaign was a desire to encourage customers to engage with the brand and share their experiences. Unfortunately it appears that McDonald’s marketing team hadn’t factored in the possibility of negative tweets before they implemented the #McDStories campaign.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but given the scale of urban myths about McDonald’s and the battles it’s had for years with animal rights campaigners and environmentalists, it’s a surprise that this campaign even got off the drawing board.

Interestingly McDonald’s reacted quickly and stopped using #McDStories but the damage was already done. Here’s how McDonald’s social media director Rick Wion reacted:

“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 1,600 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.”

Andrew Metcalf of Maxim commented: “The problem is that the hashtag fiasco is now being discussed widely on Twitter and also into the national press and marketing media – highlighting the fact that even the omnipresent and mighty McDonald’s can make a hash of Twitter.

“Despite pulling the campaign quickly, the damage was already done and the #McDStories is set to become a case study of how not to use social media.”