Be careful what you wish for: how your message can be twisted in social media and ruin your brand
Digital media has allowed brands to connect with customers and get to know them better than it used to be 10 years ago. However, it seems like big brands still miss their customers understanding, making huge mistakes that not only affect their image and reputation, but also their business. Some of these fails are so big, that it takes brands long time to recover, if ever.
What I’ve seen through the years is that social platforms have made brands interactions with their customers not only possible, but let’s say, also a bit different. This interaction stopped being a one way communication (brand to customer) and evolved into a “mutual relationship” (brand — customer… and back and forth). However, the reality is that considering its dynamic nature, social media campaigns can easily go sideways.
I’d like to share with you an example of a big brand that has failed and how its social media efforts, when not managed well, far from being helpful to achieve the brands success, became counter-productive for the brand’s performance and its business results.
This story is about Mc Donald’s and its Twitter campaign #McDStories. The fast food giant had paid for the privilege of having this hashtag promoted on the Twitter homepage; this really seems like a good idea. The original plan was to share how much McDonalds cares about their employees, staff-members, partners, collaborators, and obviously, their customers. The campaign started successfully with two stories about their employees and suppliers, promoting the hashtag #McDStories. However, this campaign backfired when people started sharing the wrong type of stories including the quality of their food, their customer service and the disturbing tales of animal abuse (hence, perhaps not such a good idea). Needless to say, the campaign had to be pulled out within the first two hours!
Now… what could have they done differently? First of all, Mc Donald’s could have probably prevented this mess, if they had tested the campaign or run some experiments that would allow the company to predict possible reactions to it. I seems likely that the lack of a contingency plan didn’t allow them to manage the situation well, causing huge damage to the brand. In my perspective, a brand that is willing to have customer interactions through social media should consider real-time mentoring, as well as training the team that manages the accounts to handle difficult situations.
Clearly, Mc Donald’s overlooked that this hashtag could easily be taken out of control. The company should not have built an entire social media campaign around a tagline, word or phrase that may be perceived in multiple ways. The more specific this words are, the better. For instance, if Mc Donald’s decides to give their customers the power to talk about its brand, at least they should make sure that everyone adores their brand first. A crowd-sourced campaign is hard to control (or stop). To make things worse, the company initially decided not to talk about it in order to avoid making the problem bigger or so they thought. However the silence only reinforced the idea that Mc Donald’s wasn’t in it really for the conversation, but only for the promotion.
For this point, I’d like to use an analogy in order to illustrate the situation better. When you want to make friends and influence people, you don’t do it by waking into a room of strangers and start talking only about yourself, right? If someone wants to have a real conversation, he/she should be open to discuss the good, as well as the ugly stuff. Then when things get tense, you cannot only walk away from the room, since you would not look good. So, why do brands think that this approach might work online with their customers? Avoiding to manage the situation and try to pretend it never happened proves to be the wrong approach. Customers understand that nobody’s perfect and that even big brands can make mistakes, although an apology is the least they expect. Mc Donald’s should have kept engaged and even answer some haters; taking ownership of mistakes is non-negotiable.
In my opinion, before getting to this point, the brand could also have thought of ways to encourage the positive stories to be published at the beginning of the campaign by offering, for example, giveaways to the first 100 in the first hour. By doing so, the positive comments would have overcome the not so good ones. After revising this case, it is important to realize that the whole world will know everything that a brand communicates through social media, hence the importance to analyze it well in advance. Nevertheless, a company has not a lot of control in viral marketing, therefore, it has to plan and play its cards in a smart way, making it more likely to achieve a positive outcome.
