McDonald's Twitter Campaign: Hype Versus Reality

In early January 2012, the director of social media for the McDonald’s Corporation (McDonald's) was challenged with a tall order. The corporation had just launched a large public relations campaign using the Twitter hashtag “#MeetTheFarmers” to promote connections with family farms and local suppliers. Maximizing a Twitter Promoted Trends expenditure, the director had switched the hashtag from “#MeetTheFarmers” to “#McDStories” halfway through the first day of the campaign. However, numerous detractors used the hashtag to express negative comments towards the corporation. A few days later, the media started to run negative coverage with mocking headlines and articles providing screenshots of the negative tweets but no statistics that explained or put proper context to the situation. The director needed to devise a better strategy for McDonald’s social media campaigns in order to prevent potential media fallouts.