Digital marketing gone wrong?

With great power comes great responsibility, especially when the power in question is the power of the social media and its ability to empower individuals to use and abuse its extensive reach. This sweet yet bitter lesson is what McDonalds was forced to encounter when their #McDStories hashtag turned out to be a digital marketing disaster. Like many other companies, McDonalds wanted to provide its customers a chance to build a more personal relationship with them and to help alleviate its image from the notorious bad nutrition fast food giant who exploits its underpaid employees. With this goal in mind they decided to buy a twitter hashtag #MeetTheFarmers to promote its use of fresh produce, but then made the crucial mistake of changing the hashtag to #McDStories. This opened the gates for all sorts of horrifying McDonalds experiences being brought forward by unsatisfied customers all over the world. Angry tweets like "Fingernail in my BigMac once #McDStories’’ and "Hospitalized for food poisoning after eating McDonalds in 1989. Never ate there again and became a Vegetarian. Should have sued #MCDStories’’ were being tweeted in great numbers. In a matter of a few hours, the first biggest digital marketing disaster had unleashed itself on twitter and the McDonalds folks failed in any attempts at damage control.

So while this experience with social media proved catastrophic for McDonalds, it also highlighted the bitter reality that social media is a very enticing platform that welcomes all sorts of opinions that cannot all be monitored. While brands relinquish pretty much all control on social media, we have seen examples when a well thought out digital marketing strategy can help in damage control in similar circumstances. O2 recently faced similar situation when its network outage led to almost 8 million customers experiencing a 24-hour blackout, and consequently exposed them to an avalanche of twitter abuse. However, O2’s social media team tried something unconventional and used the same forum to respond to each and every angry customer in a manner a good friend does who has let you down. With  such an understanding approach, and with a team of people who get social media, O2 was able to make an example of  how a customer relations disaster could be averted and converted into a positive customer experience with the help of the digital world.