Tech blog
Another fiasco on social media
Recently McDonald's invited its patrons to tweet on two topics (hashtags) on Twitter: #MeetTheFarmers and #McDStories.
The idea was perhaps to generate feel-good stories about eating French fries and deep-fried burgers, but McDonald's lost grip on the plot soon after it tweeted.
#McDStories emerged quickly as a target for people unhappy with what McDonald's was dishing out. “One time I walked into McDonalds (sic) and I could smell Type 2 diabetes floating in the air and I threw up,” tweeted one. "I havent been to McDonalds in years, because Id rather eat my own diarrhoea (sic),” tweeted another. Sensing blood, others rushed and McDonald's was soon hosting an anti-junk food crusade on its Twitter account.
McDonald's pulled out #McDStories, but not before discovering that social media was a gun, which fired at both ends, a lesson which has been appreciated by several other MNCs as well.
Two years ago, Green Peace launched a campaign against Nestle for contributing to the deforestation of Indonesian forests, the world’s only habitat of orangutans, to extract palm oil. Nestle got YouTube to delete a Green Peace video, which showed an orangutan finger coming out of a Kit Kat wrapper. The video promptly went viral on Vimeo. Nestle tried to fend off the angry environmentalists but ultimately had to commit to switch to sustainable palm oil supplies by 2015.
Soon after that Nestle got into another dispute with its Facebook followers, who were using its ‘altered version of its logos’. As even this controversy got out of hand, Nestle had to retract
its threat to delete posts with altered logos and even apologise for rude
behaviour.
Countless other MNCs have tried to master social media with similar success. Many experts blame the dogmatic approach of these companies for their PR disasters. But the problem is more fundamental. These companies have always worked to generate quarterly profits to their share holders, without worrying much about how they were messing up with the environment or the larger interest of their customers. The protests against the corporate malpractices were usually limited to certain geographies and to elements, which could have been passed off as the radical fringe.
But with the rise of social media protests spread across countries in just a few hours. It may take just one disgruntled employee or customer to launch a full scale war. Like individuals, companies also have lost their privacy. Unless they change their DNA and genuinely balance corporate with social interests, they will continue to have tense ties with social media.
