The Biggest Social Media PR Fails of the Week

You can spend ages waiting for a juicy social media PR disaster to happen, and then three come along all at once. This week saw Snickers, Bayern Munich and McDonald’s all facing a backlash over their social media campaigns, illustrating that social media is a beast that just can’t be tamed by corporations. But on the flip side, these slip-ups have led to huge coverage all over the web for these brands – who says there’s no such thing as negative publicity?

McDonald’s

McDonalds’ attempt at promoting the fast food chain via a hashtag campaign on Twitter was sabotaged this week, by users who have had less than pleasant experiences at the chain, according to the Independent, who say that McDonalds had used “a paid-for tweeting service to promote its hashtags to the top of Twitter’s “trending” lists to try and create a buzz about the campaign.”

Twitter users usurped the #McDStories hashtag, using it to give details of some awful experiences at the chain, prompting the company to put a stop to the campaign, “Rick Wion, McDonald’s social media director, admitted: “Within an hour, we saw that it wasn’t going as planned. It was negative enough that we set about a change of course.””

McDonald’s could have saved themselves a headache if they’d taken a look at the Qantas Twitter disaster that took place last year, when they too used a hashtag campaign entitled #QantsasLuxury, which was a poorly timed campaign as the airline were engaged in a dispute with unions, leading to a flurry of negative tweets.

Bayern Munich

German football club Bayren Munich came under fire from Facebook fans who were angry that they were duped into believing that a staged promotional press conference was in fact real, offthepost are reporting. During the staged press conference, instead of revealing a big name signing for the club, the sporting director of the club instead revealed a picture of the person viewing the video’s Facebook profile picture.

This was meant to emphasise how important fans are to the club, that they’re like a new signing, but ironically, this campaign had the opposite effect of infuriating fans. Unless you’re proficient in German, you might want to skip to 2:10 to see the moment the picture is revealed.

Snickers

Snickers this week created one of the boldest and inventive campaigns using celebrities on Twitter that we’ve seen. They got celebrities such as Katie Price, a glamour model, Cher Lloyd, a pop singer, and Rio Ferdinand, a footballer, to post tweets that were completely alien to their personalities and usual tweets, such Rio Ferdinand tweeting “Really getting into knitting!!! Helps me relax after high-pressure world of the Premiership” It was a tactic that instantly grabbed followers’ attention, and a few tweets later the celebrities posted pictures of themselves with Snickers bars, revealing that the whole thing was a spoof.

It was an incredibly imaginative and clever tactic, but now the stunt is being investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK to investigate if advertising codes were breached by posting the unclear and misleading tweets. But if the campaign can be judged a failure in that respect, in reality it’s a major coup for the company as the tweets generated massive coverage of the story, and the ASA investigation heightened awareness of the brand and the campaign even further.