McDisaster

Nowadays, social media marketing is a dominant strategy for many big brands. Many corporates try to engage with customers by using social media. The share ability, interactivity, and low cost are the benefits of using social media as the main marketing tools. However, social media might leads to disasters in an unexpected way sometimes. Once the marketers make the mistakes on it, things could easily backfires.

This happened to one of McDonald’s campaigns in 2012. At first, McDonald’s sponsored the hashtag #McDStories in January 2012, asking users to tweet in about positive dining experiences at its restaurants. Instead, respondents joked about obesity and dog food. Although the company pulled the campaign within two hours, it has already continued to spiral out of control. Users kept tweeting the abandoned hashtag a week after it was removed.

Although everyone use social media, its power is being underestimated at most of the time.  The McDonald’s case shows how the corporate’s intention of utilizing the interactivity between social media and customers failed. The reason of why the campaign went wrong is debatable. The marketers might need to examine more about social media before designing the tools for social media marketing campaign. Once things go public, there is no way back.

Reference:

http://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-twitter-campaign-goes-horribly-wrong-mcdstories-2012-1

http://www.smartplanet.com/photos/10-brands-damaged-by-social-media-disasters/5/