McDonald's Screwed Up and Everyone is Lovin' It

Recently McDonald’s launched a twitter campaign that blew up in their face. The fast food chain promoted the hashtags #McDStories and #meetthefarmers to encourage people to share their most intimate fast food stories (think 7th grade dance and a quick stop for a Big Mac). Instead #McDStories opened the flood gates on the lesser fond memories including unclean restaurants, bad employment experiences and questioning what’s in the food like what nelo_taylor wrote, “These #McDStories never get old, kinda like a box of McDonald's 10 piece Chicken McNuggets left in the sun for a week.”

Ouch. Now the hashtag is inundated with tweets referring to it as a social media disaster. But is it? Who would have thought an innocent enough #McDStories would have caused such a fuss? Apparently #meetthefarmers went over quite well. And of course there are going to be horror stories – this is a long-standing, globalized fast food chain.

This got me thinking - we've become so worried that we’ll be the poster child for screwing up that we stop ourselves from stepping outside the box. This past year, I attended a webinar “The Accidental Creative” by Todd Henry. A lot of what he said resonated with me including how it's okay to take a risk:

Creativity — true creativity — requires risk. They’re undeniably intertwined, and to create something really meaningful, you must be willing to go outside you’re comfort zone in order to create it.

He went on to say that there is a difference between taking a risk and gambling with the company’s integrity. What McDonald's marketing team did wasn’t gambling the company’s integrity (the company brought that upon themselves). What they did was launch a Twitter campaign, it went awry, and then they went for Plan B. Besides, when it boils down to it, will this stop people from going to McDonald’s? No. In fact, as I’m writing this, I’m craving a burger.