How to NOT run your social media campaign

**grynge** · January 26th, 2012, 7:25 PM

According to our News, McDonalds started a Meet the Farmer campaign whereby people could talk with "Real Life" paid for tweeters "Farmers"

and the started a MdStories tweet which went horribly wrong for them, scathing stories from people very very unhappy with the Golden Arches. So if you are looking at running your next social media campaign I would probably not hire McD's social media outfit.

**Kay** · January 26th, 2012, 7:53 PM

LOL! Is this an understatement or what?

""Within an hour, we saw that it wasn't going as planned."

**aneil4lom** · January 27th, 2012, 12:19 AM

Yeah, I read about this earlier today. often when I log into facebook I see posts and pictures being shared by thousands of people criticizing Mickey dees. One of the popular ones is a pic of something that looks like strawberry ice cream but it's actually the stuff used to make McNuggets.
Seriously...... how could they not realize that the thousands of people that already tweet crap about them would simply add the hashtag???

**JJMcClure** · January 27th, 2012, 2:24 AM

Yeah I saw this story, nearly started a thread about it too.

The emphasis of the version I saw though was how quickly social media trangsressions are identified, rectified and forgotten and that you should always apologise when you screw it up.

**Magnus** · January 27th, 2012, 3:13 AM

Interesting how that article presented McDonalds as the victim... poor McDonalds.

**grynge** · January 28th, 2012, 2:27 AM

Originally Posted by Magnus

Interesting how that article presented McDonalds as the victim... poor McDonalds.

Because Australia has little to no competition when it comes to the media, all media here is very very pro big business (who pay the advertising bills)

**crabfoot** · January 28th, 2012, 9:35 AM

just came across this vaguely relevant article - McDs should have read it first.

**Kay** · January 28th, 2012, 9:46 AM

Crabfoot, I clicked through to take the test on the site you linked to and they have a very weird graph with a bunch of normal people and one (on the left) labelled "blogger" who looks like a small female gorilla. I didn't like it very much.

**crabfoot** · January 28th, 2012, 10:06 AM

User experiences may vary ...

**grynge** · March 6th, 2012, 7:43 PM

Another large company here in Ausland stuffed up. One of our largest food retailes Coles, wanted to get some cheap feedback (ie not pay for research) via twitter so it started a tweet with

"In my house it's a crime not to buy..."

and quite the backlash they got.

its a crime to buy eggs from tortured chickens
its a crime to not to buy locally and I don't mean coles version of locally

You get the picture anyone with a hatred of coles decided to pop their head up.

They then tried to soften the blow with another tweet.

"It's a social media crime not to.....finish a sentence yourself. Sorry guys that post was not meant for twitter."

A bit of background, our 2 largest food retailers Coles and Woolies have for probably the last 10 years been a source of ritual cleansing of anybody that deals with them, from unrealistic delivery times, keeping stock in cold storage for months and claiming it as fresh, and of course forcing anyone selling to them (apart from other international large behemoths) to take less and less for their products, farmers were paid cents per kilo yet they charged the public sometimes upwards of 4000% profit margins all the while claiming to be supporting the local economy.