Trouble-shooting for social media - Research Paper Example

Trouble-Shooting For Social Media McDonald has been on the spotlight for failing in their social media marketing strategies. The hashtag they presented to their customers to share their inspiring stories #McDStories about their experiences in McDonald restaurants failed to deliver the intended purpose as their customers run the worse stories ranging from employees relations, type 2 diabetes, honor stores, obesity, objects they found on their foods and even stomach pains after eating their foodstuffs.

The McDonald restaurants should develop a social media policy with guidelines of account maintenance, what to post, when to post and how often. This will enable the Social media director to deliberate on object course of action in case something goes wrong. The hashtag was used for about two hours after when they realized that it was leading to negative publicity. Unfortunately, McDonalds Social media director, Rick Won pulled off the hashtag and admitted that it had failed in achieving the intended purpose.

Instead of pulling down the tweets, they could have used them from a public relations point of view to turn the negative publicity into positive publicity. Policies should be put in place to deal with the negativity instead of pulling down the negative feedback. This can involve responding to individual customers who left negative feedback and engage them on the services and products offered by the business. At the end, many of such customers end up becoming loyal customers, pin down their initial negative feedback and instead post positive feedback.

McDonald failed to track what their customers were posting on other social media sites. Even after the hashtag was removed, the public continued to outburst with a lot of unintended stories in Facebook and Instagram. Failure to monitor such action led to continued negative publicity despite pulling down the hashtag on twitter. McDonald should put in place a social mention tracking tool which monitor what customers are saying about their brand on other social sites. They will enable them respond to emergency situations before significant damage is incurred.

References http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/03/08/3981853/11-signs-your-small-business-social.htmlhttp://www.marchpr.com/social-media-2/2013/04/are-social-media-and-mobile-technology-causing-pr-problems-for-mcdonalds/http://socialmediatoday.com/david-amerland/434385/abject-lessons-learnt-mcdonald-s-social-media-disaster