#McDstories

A few weeks ago, I was watching TV and came across a commercial depicting

the cultivation process of lettuce. Inexplicably engaged, I stuck around for the rest of the ad, only to discover that the lettuce—so fresh, so green, so perfectly misted—ended up at McDonalds. As a loyal customer of the Golden Arches, I had to investigate; this was a far cry from the feel-good “I’m lovin’ it” ads of the past. It turns out that this is all part of McDonalds’ “Meet the Farmers” initiative, pioneered in order to restore faith in their ability to integrate fresh produce into their food. Along with a new vibe to their commercials, McDonalds also created a Twitter account in order to allow customers to comment on their satisfaction with the brand. Less than twenty-four hours later, McDonalds higher-ups around the globe had the striking revelation that they’d made a huge mistake.

As it turns out, not everyone is a fan of McDonalds products, and the

haters took this Twitter as an opportunity to prove it. Responding to the hashtag #McDstories, twitter users flooded the page with horror stories about various dining experiences. Some of the most notable include “fingernail in my Big Mac once,” “hospitalized for food poisoning after eating McDonalds in 1989,” and “Ordered a McDouble, something in the damn thing chipped my molar.” The account was only active for two hours, and in that time, users were able to submit close to 1600 anti-McDonalds tweets. Once the creators noticed what was trending on a page meant to promote quality products, they immediately deleted the account and slunk away in hashtag defeat.

This conflict raises many issues, most notably the double-edged sword

effect that social media has had on both individuals and large corporations. The internet is often praised and concurrently criticized for its enabling of the user to view and say anything and everything. It’s the topic that sparked the legislature of SOPA and PIPA, and it’s an issue that’s going to persist as long as the internet reigns king in society. We’ve seen the internet bring about the downfall of many a celebrity, and though we here at the Dec thirst after such material, it’s important to recognize who is actually able to recover from internet burns. Individuals may very well receive some bad flack on a blog or a Twitter, and that alone has the power to blacklist them from the media world for a significant amount of time. Large corporations like McDonalds, however, can view Twitter bashings as even less than a slap on the wrist. The number of tweets about McDonalds during the campaign totaled close to 73,000 making the 1600 horror story tweets rather insignificant and barely noticeable to the general public.

Though I’ll never concede that McDonalds is anything less than the best

fast food chain on earth, I have to wonder what they were thinking. Did Supersize Me teach them nothing? If you invite consumers to recount their experiences at your restaurant, they’re going to do just that. McDonalds has spent a great deal of their time not only promoting their name, but defending it. You’d think they’d learn what marketing moves constitute “looking for trouble.” I, however, am more irked by the angry tweeters. How can you have anything but horror stories from a restaurant that specializes in stacking processed beef between two buns and putting the blessed $.99 next to it? It’s McDonalds; you know what you’re getting, and you get what you pay for. So you found a hair in your fish sandwich…think of all the other mysterious ingredients that make up that fish sandwich. This brings you to three different courses of action: you can either pick out the hair, throw out the whole thing, or swallow it down with a knot in your arteries and a smile on your face. I, for one, always pick the most American option.