One would think that by now, corporate America would understand that some things are best left to the professionals including social media marketing.
Today saw mega fast-food giant McDonald’s, suffer the wrath of their first experiment with using #hashtags on Twitter.
Initially the mega corp had intended on marketing via Twitter’s promoted tweets that are inserted in to users timelines. They were telling the stories of farmers who produce ingredients for McDonald’s and additionally were going to hashtag the Tweets with #MeetTheFamers.
However a last minute decision to change that tag to #McDStories would be the catalyst to an epic Twitter FAIL they won’t soon forget.
Once the cat was out of the bag (no pun intended), the social network of hyper-active users hijacked the hashtag and before anyone knew what was happening…the hashtag had become a bashtag.
Below is one of the original Tweets made by McDonald’s:
…in fact this thing went so out of hand/viral that the President of Vietnam had something to say about it on his Twitter feed.
So do yourself a favor and next time you’re thinking of launching a social media marketing campaign…be sure to hire a professional and NEVER under-estimate the power of the social web.
