McDonald's Twitter Campaign Backfires

In January of 2012, McDonalds created the Twitter hashtag “#MeetTheFarmers” to promote connections with family farms and local suppliers. Halfway through the first day of the campaign, the director had switched the hashtag from “#MeetTheFarmers” to “#McDStories”, to create an opportunity for the public to share their own McDonald’s stories. However, numerous critics used the hashtag to mention bad experience and express negative comments towards the corporation. In an attempt to change the course of the campaign, the hashtag was changed back to “#MeetTheFarmers” in less than two hours, thereby reducing the number of negative feedbacks. However, a few days later, the media started to run negative coverage with mocking headlines and articles providing screenshots of the negative tweets with no statistics to explain or put proper context into the situation. This essay indicates two problems, fail to notice the negative effects of unrestricted and broad conversation on Twitter, and cannot handle negative media coverage.
McDonald’s failed to acknowledge the potential problems with inviting an open-ended conversation on Twitter, by using the “#McDstories” hashtag. In undertaking a social media outreach effort like this, there is always the risk that the conversation can be co-opted and negatively impacted. Subsequently, bad press can hurt a brand, even when comments are meant as a joke, and even if they are over-the-top. "Once you have a negative association, it 's almost impossible to just remove the link from people 's minds” (Fitzsimons & Morwitz, 2007, p. 489). To avoid such risk, a company that is using Twitter as media to advertise, should consider the brand affinity on various social networks and the choice of words for posts. Furthermore, the company also needs to be prepared for a mixed response and figure out a contingency plan. Last but not least, the firm must keep the focus on customers and not to negative responses.
Brand affinity needs to be examined

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