McDonald's Left Blushing Over Failed Twitter Promotional Campaign
In a development that shows how social media activity can backfire on brands, fast-food giant McDonald's has admitted that it suffered a marketing nightmare after having its Twitter campaign ambushed by detractors.
The restaurant chain had aimed to use Twitter's fledgling promotional hashtag ad platform to encourage fans to share positive memories about McDonald's experiences - it was called #McDStories.
The campaign went awry when critics such a animal rights group PETA started using the hashtag to highlight McDonald's practices, and unhappy customers jumped on board to share damning stories.
McDonald's Social Media Director, Rick Wion, commented: "Within an hour, we saw that it wasn't going as planned. It was negative enough that we set about a change of course. With all social media campaigns, we include contingency plans should the conversation not go as planned. The ability to change midstream helped this small blip from becoming something larger."
Nevertheless, yesterday McDonald's reported an 8% increase in their total revenue compared to last year and their global sales have also risen by 5.6%.