Like most corporate social media/viral marketing campaigns, it all started innocently enough. Probably the brainchild of some fresh-faced college grad charged with handling the McDonald’s Twitter account who was just looking to validate receiving a paycheck.
“Hey I’ve got an idea…why not have our followers tell some of their favorite stories about McDonald’s on Twitter,” is how I’m guessing it all started. Then it all went so horribly wrong.
According to a McDonald’s flack…
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.
Yeah, “did not go as planned” is one way of putting it. Another way of putting it is “Did you really think the legions of McDonald’s haters weren’t going to take something like this and run with it?”
Sadly, many of the original, hilarious tweets are buried under people retweeting articles about this disaster, but we managed to find a few for you to enjoy, or vomit from, in the next few slides, along with a few we’ve borrowed from Hypervocal and Buzzfeed. Enjoy.