Using social media can be a simple and effective way to market a brand. Such social networking tools have seemingly fallen into the laps of corporations and have provided them with a new venue to connect with their customers on perhaps a more interpersonal level.

That, however, was most likely what fast-food giant McDonald’s thought when they launched their #McDStories campaign earlier this year. For those who aren’t quite familiar with this story (which ironically has become a McDStory itself), last January McDonald’s created a social media marketing strategy on Twitter which focused on the notion that customers would use the #McDStories as a hashtag to express feel-good and positive stories regarding their experiences at the fast-food chain. Yet, this was not the case. Not at all.

Instead, the hashtag backfired on them and ultimately the campaign became a failure as well as blueprint for how not to use social media. In other words, people used the hashtag to instead share their gross, disgusting, and sometimes disturbing stories about their true McDonald’s experiences.

This clearly is social media marketing gone wrong. This story, however, shouldn’t merely be a reminder of the potential dangers of investing in social media (especially those more traditional companies) rather it should be a reminder of the importance of understanding how social media operates, and also how to effectively communicate your brand using these tools.

Here are two reasons why this social media campaign failed and why others can just as easily fall on its own sword:

1) Trying to be something you’re not

One of the fundamental issues I see with this marketing campaign is that McDonald’s tried to become something they are not; they essentially did not stay true to their brand. Companies typically fall under three categories in which they can be categorized: price, convenience,and image. These categories are also important to the marketing of the brand as they represent what the company is all about.

In this case, it seems as if the #McDStories campaign steered toward representing McDonald’s as a brand of great image when everyone knows they are a company based on their cheap food prices by comparison.

Instead of trying to convey McDonald’s as a lifestyle brand they should have tried promoting themselves as a company that does great charitable work as well. Yes, you can get ‘great cheap food here’ but also you can sleep well at night knowing that you are helping donate to the Ronald McDonald House of Charities!

2) Refraining from seeing social media as an essential tool to connect to your customers

Traditional senses of marketing and advertising usually translates into a ‘one-sided mirror’ streamline of communication: this is what we have to offer you, should you choose to accept or deny. But social media marketing works exponentially different in the sense that tools such as Twitter gives the public — the customers — a voice that can be heard, and more importantly, seen permanently and immediately.

If you are a company and you create a hashtag to promote your company (even with such silly marketing schlock as #McDStories)  then you better be prepared to receive your mailbag’s worth of hatemail. I see it as this: social networking media should be viewed as a public suggestion box — you’re going to get cruel notes stuck together with gum, but if you look deep enough, it should be easy to find the desired responses from your dedicated customers.

McDonalds however did somewhat come to their senses as their Twitter status now reads: We’re here to listen and learn from all of our fans and followers.

Austin, Texas’ SXSW festival seems to be growing every year. For twenty-five years, the event has been a successful “launching pad” for new creative content with a convergence of music, films, and emerging technologies. The past few years, however, SXSW has seen a significant rise of interest in the interactive media portion of the event, which has really paved the way for the increaing importance of social media content.

In a keynote conference on Monday, Biz Stone — who was recently coined as GQ’s Nerd of the Year and one of the Most Influential People in the World by Time Magazine — took the time to share personal stories of his failures and successes as a digital entrepreneur.

As Twitter’s co-founder, Stone divulged into different stories, each with a determined notion to convey: the new technologies that come to be at our disposal ultimately can come to affect positive change in the world. In other words, Stone stressed that new social content and technologies should be used for the good where value is placed above profit alone.

“We have the opportunity to totally transform the definition of capitalism,” Stone states in perhaps his most intriguing comment of the session. “Change the world, build business and make money and have fun doing it.”

Stone, also the co-founder of The Obvious Corporation, sarcastically boasted the absence of his presence at SXSW since he made his first appearance in 2007, making light of the idea that he did not want to ‘jinx’ his recent successes.

His first discussion of the keynote focused on the story of how he came to create Twitter, as well as how it has become what it is today. Stone had quit Google years before with greater passions of future technology and had become inspired to create Twitter from a friend who had built taxi dispatch software. As he describes, the software to him represented the pulse of the city where everyone was checking in - it could be seen as a living city. After years of developing and poor feedback from friends who had thought it was a bad idea, Stone discovered the mass appeal of this social media tool at a bar in Austin during the 2007 SXSW, when a guy in a pub tweeted that a particular pub was ‘too loud’ and that he was going to walk to a better one across town.

“In the eight minutes that it took him to get to that pub,” Stone stated, “there were eight-hundred people already at the pub. Word got out.”

The reason why this story is so important, and conveniently relevant, in a contemporary social standpoint is because, as he promotes, it exemplifies how social media content can be a powerful source of communication not just as a means of technology, but also that a tool of productivity and social good.

It can be understood as a ‘flock of birds’ that are moving together in flight around an object. Like the birds, the eight-hundred individuals who came to the pub for a social gathering “moved together as if they were one”. In essence, Stone’s Twitter is a social media tool that has been able to change the way people think of the social; it has become a tool where any one voice can be heard by countless others in an instant.

“No matter how sophisticated our machines get, change is not a triumph of technology; it’s a triumph of humanity - with some help from technology”, Stone continues. “If you give tools to people that help them do good things, they will exhibit that behaviour on a regular basis.”

After the 2007 SXSW, Stone describes, Twitter became a house-hold name, received awards and became a powerful communication tool which, to him, felt like there wasn’t an event in the world where it seemed like they weren’t part of the story. Twitter became a bubble in the world — and vice versa.

“I was overwhelmed because I couldn’t think of any tool or service that allowed this power to be in the hands of humans.”

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter, @Sean Catania.

Every other month there seems to be a new social cause arising on social networking sites, such as Facebook or Twitter. With little things such as changing their profile picture or forwarding a status update, countless individuals have been exercising their support for these frequent trending causes.

However, despite the recent controversy with creator Jason Russel, the newly established KONY 2012 video has been making waves in the public and in the media, attracting over 70+ million views (on Youtube and Vimeo), in only three weeks.

For the most part, the media attention has interestingly not primarily been about Joseph Kony himself;  Kony, the man, is only half of the story. Much of the concentration in the media has largely focused on the KONY 2012 campaign’s recent viral success. What began as a simple yet effective video campaign based on spreading awareness of a certain cause has quickly developed into a media narrative on its social networking success - it has become a viral trend about a trend.

Kenneth C. Wisnefski,of the The Washington Post,elucidates that the, “[KONY 2010 video] is now becoming more than a trend — viral is, in large part, the future of marketing”.

So what has made KONY 2012 rise above most of all other contemporary social trends in terms of awareness?  Corporations, individuals, and social causes are now beginning to recognize the exceptional power that ‘the viral’ can have on establishing significant marketing practices.

There certainly are lessons that can me learned from such a polarizing campaign. Social Media specialists have dissected and studied the video to determine some of these important lessons, in this FORBES article:

12 Lessons from KONY 2012 from Social Media Power Users

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter, @Sean Catania.

Austin, Texas’ SXSW festival seems to be growing every year. For twenty-five years, the event has been a successful “launching pad” for new creative content with a convergence of music, films, and emerging technologies. The past few years, however, SXSW has seen a significant rise of interest in the interactive media portion of the event, which has really paved the way for the increaing importance of social media content [1].

In a keynote conference on Monday, Biz Stone — who was recently coined as GQ’s Nerd of the Year and one of the Most Influential People in the World by Time Magazine[2]—  took the time to share personal stories of his failures and successes as a digital entrepreneur.

As Twitter’s co-founder, Stone divulged into different stories, each with a determined notion to convey: the new technologies that come to be at our disposal ultimately can come to affect positive change in the world. In other words, Stone stressed that new social content and technologies should be used for the good where value is placed above profit alone.

“We have the opportunity to totally transform the definition of capitalism,” Stone states in perhaps his most intriguing comment of the session. “Change the world, build business and make money and have fun doing it.”

Stone, also the co-founder of The Obvious Corporation, sarcastically boasted the absence of his presence at SXSW since he made his first appearance in 2007, making light of the idea that he did not want to ‘jinx’ his recent successes.

His first discussion of the keynote focused on the story of how he came to create Twitter, as well as how it has become what it is today. Stone had quit Google years before with greater passions of future technology and had become inspired to create Twitter from a friend who had built taxi dispatch software. As he describes, the software to him represented the pulse of the city where everyone was checking in - it could be seen as a living city. After years of developing and poor feedback from friends who had thought it was a bad idea, Stone discovered the mass appeal of this social media tool at a bar in Austin during the 2007 SXSW, when a guy in a pub tweeted that a particular pub was ‘too loud’ and that he was going to walk to a better one across town.

“In the eight minutes that it took him to get to that pub,” Stone stated, “there were eight-hundred people already at the pub. Word got out.”

The reason why this story is so important, and conveniently relevant, in a contemporary social standpoint is because, as he promotes, it exemplifies how social media content can be a powerful source of communication not just as a means of technology, but also that a tool of productivity and social good.

It can be understood as a ‘flock of birds’ that are moving together in flight around an object. Like the birds, the eight-hundred individuals who came to the pub for a social gathering “moved together as if they were one”[3]. In essence, Stone’s Twitter is a social media tool that has been able to change the way people think of the social; it has become a tool where any one voice can be heard by countless others in an instant.

“No matter how sophisticated our machines get, change is not a triumph of technology; it’s a triumph of humanity - with some help from technology”, Stone continues. “If you give tools to people that help them do good things, they will exhibit that behaviour on a regular basis.”

After the 2007 SXSW, Stone describes, Twitter became a house-hold name, received awards and became a powerful communication tool which, to him, felt like there wasn’t an event in the world where it seemed like they weren’t part of the story. Twitter became a bubble in the world — and vice versa.

“I was overwhelmed because I couldn’t think of any tool or service that allowed this power to be in the hands of humans.”

Sean Catania

—

[1] http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/03/15/where-the-geeks-are-dispatches-from-the-largest-sxsw-interactiv/

[2] http://austin.culturemap.com/newsdetail/03-12-12-22-56-using-content-for-social-change-five-lessons-from-twitter-founder-biz-stone/

[3] http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-03-12/tech/31149724_1_biz-stone-twitter-technology