Not Lovin’ It
The Internet is abuzz today after a McDonald’s Twitter stunt went wrong. It all started last Thursday when the company started a tweet campaign featuring the hashtag #MeetTheFarmers.
Designed to promote the idea that the fast food chain actually uses fresh produce from real honest-to-goodness farmers and not some strange Franken-vegetables grown in a lab the tweets featured links to feel-good promotional stories:
The promotion didn’t make much of an impression on the public and the tweets were mostly ignored (despite its global reach and near-universal brand recognition, McDonald’s Twitter account only has—as of 10:00 AM, January 25—289,520 followers, many of whom appear to be spambots if my brief perusal is any judge). This changed, though, when they posted a farmer related tweet with a new hashtag:
It seemed innocent enough, but somewhere out there in the twitterverse a few people noticed the change and decided to do what the Internet often does best—vent. Within a few hours the #McDStories hashtag was definitely being used to tell stories about the chain—they just weren’t the stories McDonald’s wanted to be told.
Part of the problem was that rather than just go out to people who followed the chain’s twitter feed, the tweet was also included as a promotional tweet in the timelines of people who either had less than enthusiastic things to say about the company or didn’t quite project the image they might have preferred:
Interestingly, though, as of today, the majority of the tweets with the hashtag are links to stories about the marketing blunder. In fact, there are more of these tweets than there are of the ones that inspired these news stories in the first place.
For anyone who dabbles in social media marketing it’s a good lesson regarding how quickly good intentions can go awry in an interactive medium where many folks might be openly hostile to your brand.
But for me the bigger lesson is how in today’s media landscape, mistakes like these can become instantly magnified and seem like much bigger deals than they are. The fact is only a handful of people used the hashtag to express negative opinions, but the resulting press articles and—especially—the rapid, schadenfreudic sharing of these articles through social media, makes it seem like a major promotional gaffe.
This disconnect between perception and reality is something everyone in marketing and advertising has to become aware of. As convincing as we can be, it’s nearly impossible to get the toothpaste back into the tube and even harder to persuade people that a perceived disaster was really nothing more than a minor inconvenience.