Remember the #qantasluxury PR fail? It seems someone didn’t learn from it. Somewhere in corporate Hamburgerland, an ad executive with a penchant for “social media” and “the Twitter” thought a McDonald’s-themed hashtag would sell more food. Oh boy was he wrong. Mickey D’s Twitter push is backfiring harder than E. coli vomit.
The facile burger peddlers hoped to create a “viral”, “organic” marketing campaign, presumably comprised of customers sharing their fond fast food memories. Something like “I miss eating nuggets with grandma. #RIPgrams #mcdstories”
Instead, they got a torrent of this:
[View the story "#McDStoriese" on Storify]
Now McDonald’s has pulled the promoted hashtag and given the following mea culpa to Business Insider:
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.
Didn’t go as planned, just like an Arch Deluxe filled with baby feet. [Business Insider]
light487
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 11:56 AMHow exactly do you “pull” a hashtag?? I mean.. are they getting Twitter to block the hashtag?
CraftyNinja
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 11:56 AMSo, let me get this straight, they PULLED the hashtag instead of using it to listen to customer complaints that they could then rectify and use THAT for positive publicity?
Most Corporate types don’t understand social media, and in an ever-increasing crowd of social media experts, its unacceptable for a corporation that large to not know how to handle these types of things properly.
Cameron
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 12:15 PMBashing on McDonalds is the new black though. I doubt the ‘corporate types’ could rectify things like faeces on the wall. Which probably never even happened.
CraftyNinja
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 12:35 PMGood Point.
“Faeces on the wall” could a new meme, albeit a disgusting one.
kato
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 4:33 PMhahaha rectify
Bdc
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 12:38 PMLol I wouldn’t be so sure…
Dionysus
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 1:41 PMI used to party a a lot, till one night I took some faeces to the knee
CraftyNinja
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 3:20 PMEDIT:
I used to party a lot, till one night someone put some faeces on my wall.
James
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 8:00 PMSpeaking as a McDonalds employee, faeces on the walls and floor of the customer bath rooms is actually an ‘every cople of months’ kind of occurance, rather than a ‘probably never happens’ one. It’s been found on the floor of the dining area on one ocasion in the time I’ve been working there.
Johnno
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 5:16 PMThis seems to be because the ‘corporate type’ positions are being held on to by baby boomers who are refusing to retire / die.
If you were born in 1945, TV didn’t even exist in a mainstream fashion for the first 11 years of your life. So is it any wonder they don’t understand the interwebnets?
macdave
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 12:46 PMI think you could argue that many contemporary art galleries have that stuff on the walls too.