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]