Mcdonald’s tea is served.
In 2012 Mcdonald’s decided to generate a hashtag on Twitter. They promoted this hashtag on its other social media platforms including their verified, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts. Mcdonald’s advertised to their customers to use the now infamous hashtag… “McDstories.” Little did Mcdonald’s know… this hashtag would turn into one of its biggest horror stories.
Mcdonalds intentions for the hashtags was to allow its farmers and customers to use the hashtag to share their great experiences and love for America’s most recognized fast-food chain. However, as you can guess, that did not happen at all. The positive reflection on the brand that was formerly intended took a hard left turn when the hashtag started to gather a lot of hate. Twitter users took control of the hashtag and began to use it to dismantle Mcdonald’s food quality, service, and workers. This hashtag became flooded with hate posts and unsatisfied customers in under 24 hours of the hashtag being live.
News article “Insider” reported that there was over 72.788 mentions of McDonalds the day the hashtag went live.
Pro? people were talking.
Con? almost all of them were negative. Below I have attached screenshots of some of the tweets that were actually posted using the hashtag. These photos are uploaded in a slide show format. Use the right or left arrows to flip through the photos.
Although it was inevitable that McDonald’s would generate some hate, you can never please everyone and there are thousands of their restaurants all over the world. However, the unpredictable amount of back lash and unhappy customers that were active on the Twitter hashtag turned into Mcdonald’s nightmare. The general age of twitter users is 24-34 proximally and both men and women were active in the tweeting.
To counter these attacks, Mcdonald’s deactivated the hashtag #McDstories in under 48 hours of it being live. Mcdonald’s then proceeded to announce a public apology on all the active verified social media platforms it once advertised the hashtag. Again, this was their blue checked verified accounts on: Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. The accounts also replied to some of the messages apologizing to the author of the tweet for their bad experience and to DM the account directly. Unfortunately, with almost 73,000 tweets, it was impossible to get back to everyone.
Since 2012, the hate comments withered away with the years, and Mcdonald’s has stayed out of crisis issues. I believe that Mcdonald’s took this as a lesson learned. Clearly this scandal did not hold enough weight to put Mcdonald’s out of business and I don’t know if there’s anything that ever will. Mcdonald’s is globally known as a successful fast-food restaurant. They are powerful. Their famous Big Mac, French fries, and seasonal snacks like the shamrock shake has been sold in the millions since 2012 and will continue to do so.
It was interesting to read into how an innocent attempt in sharing the McLove, turned into Mchorror story of Twitter in January 2012.
Teaching Social Media 