Mc Donald's and the #McFail

In January of 2012, Mc Donald's launced a campaign with the hashtag #McDStories to encourage fellow tweeters to share their positive experiences with Mc Donald's on the web. At the same time they launched a second campaign with the hashtag #MeetTheFarmers. The goal must have been to create a more trustworthy image of the restaurants and to work towards the new "green-initiative" Mc Donald's has going on.

The campaign started with the following post:

'Meet Dirk Giannini, McDonald’s lettuce supplier, as he shows u his life on the farm #MeetTheFarmers http://mcd.to/AyvF4M'

Having the followers set in this certain direction, Mc Donald's tweeted a few hours later:

'When u make something w/pride, people can taste it,' - McD potato supplier #McDStories http://t.co/HaPM5G9F'

...thus starting a huge backlash of tweets with certain, definately non-intended, stories.

Not only were some tweeters sharing stories about their drug-induced snack attacks, a huge part of the tweets with the hashtag #McDStories contained horror-experiences and bashing of the low-quality Mc Donald's fastfood:

'These #McDStories never get old, kinda like a box of McDonald's 10 piece' [@nelo_taylor]

'Watching a classmate projectile vomit his food all over the restaurant during a 6th grade trip. #McDStories' [@jfsmith23]

'I haven’t been to McDonalds in years, because I’d rather eat my own diarrhea.' [@MuzzaFuzza]

Within a few hours the marketing responsibles realized that their hashtag wasn't working as imagined. The situation became worse because the initial #McDStories post was a promoted tweet and badly enough became a "Top Tweet", a tweet that is getting extremely high engagement when people search for a term. This only happened because of the huge interest in this hashtag.

Mc Donald's, interestingly enough, quickly reacted on the misuse of their promotional idea and pulled the campaign only two hours after its launch. After that the number of conversations about it fell from over 1,600 to only a few dozen.

Lessons learned

Even though the #McDStories campaign was pulled, the #MeetTheFarmers hashtag persisted because it had no connection to the backlash that happened.
It seems pretty easy to say by now - but before one launches a featured tweet and one spends thousands of dollars on it, one should think about how a hashtag can be interpreted. This applies even more to a brand that faces perpetual criticism from animal rights- and consumer protection groups.
Instead of the #McDStories campaign, Mc Donald's could have started a competition to send in the most creative customer-stories and have them pubslished on their website, acting like a ruthless editor much like Coca Cola.

Pulling the campaign and keeping silence about it seems to have been the perfect way of responding. Every kind of response to the trashing would have ended in even more media attention and would have helped the horror stories to spread even faster.