McDonald backlash after Twitter campaign #McDstories
A Twitter campaign created by McDonald went incredibly wrong when people started sharing negative stories using #McDstories.
On January 18, 2012, the fast-food giant launched a digital relations campaign on Twitter to highlight the organic farmers working for McDonald. This campaign was initially launched to reduce the assumption about McDonald’s unhealthy image and create awareness of their fresh vegetables and high-quality meat (Case Study #McDStories, 2019; Friedman, 2019). The team firstly initiated a hashtag called #meetThefarmers on Twitter. As the day went on, the public relation team decided to change the hashtag because they were not impressed by the result and said the hashtag didn’t spread as much as they expected it (Avila, 2015). Few hours after the launch, they modified the hashtag to #McDStories and paid to be number one on Twitter’s trends list (Case Study #McDStories, 2019; Avila, 2015). To promote the new hashtag McDonald didn’t give any sight and just posted a post using the hashtag (Figure 1).
After less than two hours with the new hashtag, people on Twitter started sharing stories using #McDStories. However, not only positive and relatable stories were shared. People started sharing negative personal experiences/stories with the brand. Many people were posting about poor customer services, food poisoning and other hateful posts about McDonald (Figure 2).
As a result, #McDStories backlash on Twitter in less than an hour after the new second hashtag was created for their organic farmers’ campaign.
How is this a fail?
The campaign was considered a failure, especially taking into account that it was initiated to promote the organic farmers’ producers working for McDonald. Although the success of #meetThefarmers was actually raising awareness of the Supplier Stories campaign at the start, #mcDStories was a completely different story. As social media campaigns are intended to open two-way communication between a brand and its customers (Friedman, 2019), McDonald surely didn’t communicate enough for their customers to ensure their community used their hashtag correctly.
The McDonald hashtag fails happened through Twitter and following Boyle’s definition of the social network site, it is acceptable to say that Twitter has all the features that composed social network site as network public, including profiles, friends lists, public commenting tools and stream-based updates.
Moreover, according to Boyle a content of networked publics features persistence, replicability, searchability and scalability (Boyd, 2011). As a whole, McDonald’s Twitter account responds successfully to all of the above features, which allowed McDonald’s campaign to fail in such a small amount of time and to a very large scale. In fact, any copywriting, photos and video content related to the hashtag provides persistence to the network public and enabled it to spread online globally. Also, since Twitter allows users to repost content, the principle of replicability is applied. In fact, the #mcDStories is still in use today. Lastly, the scalability feature of networked publics is highly adapted to this hashtag since it is still accessible through any search engine as well as on the internet.
During the campaign, McDonald afforded their users opportunities to communicate with people globally structuring them to networked publics (Boyd, 2011; Varnelis, 2008). Furthermore, the affordances of social media technology were presenting an alternative opportunity for McDonald to promote strategically their campaign to their communities through the use of #mcDStories to create more engagement and eventually leading to a participatory-led campaign. However, the perils of networked publics are painfully apparent when the content shared is negative (Gillespie, 2017). As a result, the massive online community of McDonald engaged with the hashtag and shared any kind of stories they had with McDonald regardless of the initial aim of the campaign.
McDonald had no control over changing the way the hashtag was negatively used by their global community. According to Gillespie, hate speech regulation of social media can be considered as needing required intermediaries to monitor and/or remove comments or posts (Gillespie, 2017). In this situation, McDonald did receive hate speech from people but could not rely on any regulation by platforms and/or moderation of content because they did not monitor their customers’ tweets (Case Study #McDStories, 2019). In consequence, it allowed people to spread negative perceptions and stories of the organization even after McDonald removed their promotional post about the hashtag. As a result, the company had absolutely no control on their own distributed content which led them to stop the campaign after less than 2 hours. The company decided not to respond to any of the tweets (Case Study #McDStories, 2019).
Another major factor that made this campaign fail is the fact that the disruption of new media leads social content to be exposed to an unlimited audience, as well as gaining large visibility very fast (Ford, 2013). As the McDonald’s Twitter community is very large, the spreadability happened and led the hashtag to move through communities and exists at multiple points of contact (Ford, 2013). While the post was mostly negative, it led McDonald to be fully exposed to their failure. As a result, it organically builds sharable post of negatives experiences targeting McDonald in only a few hours.
Avoiding the fail
Although this backlash hasn’t affected McDonald in its fourth quarterly number, the incident has clearly failed in terms that it didn’t attain its main goal and was even put down by the company itself in reason of negatives reposts (Hill, 2019) such as hate speech affecting the company’s image.
The company should have identified potential fails prior to launch their campaign’s hashtag. They could have identified niches of people that would dislike their product to prevent being hijacked from those.
Moreover, McDonald could have promoted the hashtag with more insight prior to letting their audience use the hashtag as they wish to. By doing that, they could have potentially succeeded in their paid Twitter campaign providing a clearer use to their users.
Although the massive McDonald community already started spreading the negative, McDonald could have initiated a more positive aspect to the hashtag. This could have reduced the misleading campaign. In fact, the fast-food giant could have reposted positive stories from their point of view, to give people insight about the hashtag’s purpose. Considering that it was already a global fail, this kind of post would have give structure and encourage people further into sharing positive content instead of hateful content. Even though the purpose of the hashtag would have changed from the initial campaign, it could have been considered less of a fail if it would have been converted.
Here’s an example of a potential post:
Caption: We love, as much as you, celebrating birthdays at our house! #mcDStories
<Including the image>
To conclude, the #McDStories was very vague and non-explicated and left people to free speech about McDonald.
Finally, McDonald failed to communicate clearly with their customers the aim of their campaign and resulted in a backlash on Twitter, and still today the hashtag is used for negative call out on McDonald.
References
Avila, C. (2015). McDonald’s is a #McFail When it Comes To #McDStories — Social Media for Business Performance. Retrieved from https://smbp.uwaterloo.ca/2015/02/mcdonalds-is-a-mcfail-when-it-comes-to-mcdstories/
Boyd, D. (2011). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39–58). New York: Routledge
Burke, E. (2019). Full edited image from Unsplash [Image]. Retrieved from https://unsplash.com/photos/YV5cUOfU1rI
Burke, E. (2019). Screen shot of my Twitter — Search #McDStories filtering Latest Posts [Image]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%23McDStories&src=typd&lang=en
Case Study #McDStories. (2019). Retrieved from https://diazglaura.wordpress.com/2013/12/06/case-study-mcdstories/)(
Ford, S. (2013). When It Comes To Content Strategy, It’s Better To Think About Spreadability Than Stickiness. Retrieved from https://www.fastcompany.com/3005264/when-it-comes-content-strategy-its-better-think-about-spreadability-stickiness
Friedman, B. (2019). McDonald’s Promoted Twitter Campaign #McFailed. Retrieved from https://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/mcdonalds-promoted-twitter-campaign-mcfailed
Gillespie, T. (2017). The SAGE Handbook of Social Media: Regulation of and by Platforms (1st ed., pp. 254–258, 270). SAGE Publications.
Hill, K. (2019). #McDStories: When A Hashtag Becomes A Bashtag. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/01/24/mcdstories-when-a-hashtag-becomes-a-bashtag/
Lubin, G. (2019). McDonald’s Twitter Campaign Goes Horribly Wrong #McDStories. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com.au/mcdonalds-twitter-campaign-goes-horribly-wrong-mcdstories-2012-1?r=US&IR=T
Meeuws, S. (2019). Why #McDStories Didn’t Have a Happy Ending. Retrieved from https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/01/24/why-mcdstories-didnt-have-a-happy-ending/
Party at our House!. (2019). [Image]. Retrieved from https://mymcdonaldsparty.com/#chooseparty
Serazio, M., & Erin Duffy, B. (2017). The SAGE Handbook of Social Media; Social Media Marketing (1st ed., pp. 482–492). SAGE Publications.
#McDStories RUIN LIVES!!. (2012). [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0hh3M-EanA
Varnelis, K. (2008). Networked publics (1st ed.)
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.