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McDonalds Twitter Hashtag Promotion Backfires

By Andrew Redfern @ 24th January 2012 12:26 pm Twitter

Fast food giant McDonalds has had a social media nightmare after a promotional hashtag it launched on Twitter was hijacked by angry customers.

Using the paid-for tweeting service to promote hashtags to the top of the trending lists, McDonalds created the #MeetTheFarmers hashtag last week in order to post wholesome stories about the fresh produce supplied by farmers to the famous Golden Arches.

However, a couple of tweets used the more general #McDStories hashtag, and it was this that was seized upon by Twitter users wanting to air their grievances about the chain.

Customers tweeted about their negative experiences eating at McDonalds, with endless tales of chipped teeth and cases of food poisoning, while one user claimed to have found a fingernail in a Big Mac burger.

Other users took to the #McDStories hashtag to share their bad McDonalds experiences, until the chain decided to pull the promoted hashtag as it had veered so drastically off-message they felt it was unrecoverable.

McDonalds social media director Rick Wion said of the failed campaign: “Within an hour, we saw that it wasn’t going as planned. It was negative enough that we set about a change of course.”

The original #MeetTheFarmers hashtag has managed to escape the McDonalds backlash, and is still being used on Twitter.

Twitter characters. Who is the king of the pretenders

By Andrew Redfern @ 25th June 2011 11:17 am Twitter

By the time you have finished watching episode one your favourite TV it is fairly likely the character names are already being grabbed. It’s not spammers or cynical ebayers looking to cash in on merchandise, it will most likely be a twitter character being born.

A quick look reveals no less than three Robert Baratheons complete with three King Joffreys all dispensing witty parodies of HBO smash Game of Thrones.

“Had Ilyn tear out a few organs, made my fiancée look at her dad’s severed head & had a guard beat her. A good day!” tweets “Joff” whilst his dad’s Twitter alter ego laments marrying a Lannister and the fact that none of his children look like him. All in-jokes to bring a smile to fans of the show. Similarly the whole cast of characters from the BBC’s Sherlock are to be found solving a light-hearted series of mysteries (and doing a fair bit of arguing amongst themselves).

It isn’t limited to tv and movies, Wayne Rooney’s son Kai has had a comedy online persona from the second he was born and Sam Allardyce, Arsene Wenger and Harry Redknapp all have numerous streams of consciousness satirising them. David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband and inevitably The Queen all have their fake-personas as do Lord Voldermort and Narnia’s Snow Queen plus despite his recent brush with the American Special Forces “Osama Bin Laden” has never been as prolific.

Refreshingly the motivation for these accounts seems to be purely for the fun of it, you have to wonder what the victims of these sometimes biting satires think however for the rest of us it can provide a wry look at the world through the imagined eyes of your favourite public figure.

That these accounts are virtually all spam-free whilst Twitter is awash with bots and spam-bots highlights that despite being massively popular and ripe for monetarisation Twitter is still as irreverent and light as ever.

Promoted Tweets to “Invade” Our Twitter Streams in 2 Months

By Andrew Redfern @ 24th June 2011 3:43 pm Twitter

As social networking and microblogging site Twitter bids to consolidate its status as one of the web’s big guns, plans to include paid-for advertising tweets within our timelines have now been given a deadline.

Promoted tweets will appear within Twitter user’s personal feeds within the next 8 weeks, according to several sources who have been briefed on the matter.
These commercially driven, paid for tweets are not a new phenomenon, but had previously only appeared within relevant Twitter searches and on the social media dashboard Hootsuite. Now, advertisers have been told that these tweets will pop up within member’s personal streams, a massive step forward for ad campaigns within the site.

Advertisers are assured that promoted tweets are here to say, and Twitter plans to make sure that we see them. One idea is to make the paid-for tweets ‘sticky’, meaning that no matter how far we scroll down, these pesky ads will stay at the top of the page.

Users of the Twitter iPhone app will already be familiar with this sort of intrusive advertisement. The iPhone app’s unpopular Quick Bar stuck to the top of the Twitter user’s display screen and earned itself the less than affectionate nickname Dick Bar (in honour of CEO Dick Costello).

Twitter clearly thinks that the Quick Bar technique will seem less intrusive on a computer screen and, given the amount of advertisements already cluttering the average web page, they’re probably right.

The social media giant certainly seems desperate to move forward with the idea. And why wouldn’t they? If the plan comes together, Twitter will expose us to a wealth of lucrative advertising without suffering a major backlash; and improving their already impressive returns – Twitter is expected to gross a whopping $100 million this year.

But will the promoted tweet pay off? Will advertisers see the profit in the scheme and give Twitter the sort of advertising pulling power that Facebook enjoys? We don’t know the answers yet. But what we do know for sure is that promoted tweets are coming to Twitter, they’re coming very soon, and they won’t be going anywhere in a hurry.

Social media, a Valuable Information Source for Activities Surrounding the Japanese Quake

By Andrew Redfern @ 11th March 2011 6:25 pm Twitter

In the wake of the Japanese earth quake and tsunami, social media has shown to be an increasingly important method for transmitting a live feed of events, keeping the world up to date on the disaster. This has become more popular in recent disasters and for people posting photos and their experiences about how they had been affected when disaster strikes.

Twitter has been a key source for many people around the world following the events. Trending hashtags on Twitter included #prayforjapan, #japan, #japanquake and #tsunami. People were promising to update their feeds when they receive more information, showing further the importance of the micro blogging site for updating people on natural disasters.

News and media organisations around the world have been showing up to date coverage online. Governments are also keeping the world updated by releasing valuable information as it comes in on their websites. The US government has also issued tsunami warnings for much of its western coast online.

Google has provided a website in Japanese and English to help to locate missing friends and family members. Its real-time search facility also came in to good use today with a new constantly updated tab being added to give a count of the number of real-time results being logged.

This activity shows just how important social media and live blogging has become to keep people up to date with world affairs and leads to the question, what would we do without it?

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WikiLeaks Hackers Cause Havoc on Busiest Online Shopping Days

By Andrew Redfern @ 9th December 2010 3:42 pm Twitter

After the announcement that the World’s biggest credit card and online payment companies would no longer process payments funding WikiLeaks, an international group of hackers, called Anonymous have targeted Visa, MasterCard and PayPal in a series of cyber attacks dubbed “operation payback”. The MasterCard secure code was stopped for 6 hours yesterday which affected hundreds of thousands of shoppers worldwide. Visa also went down after it was targeted in the attacks. This movement comes on some of the busiest online shopping days of the year in the run up to Christmas which will have a substantial impact on online retailers.

5000 ‘hacktivists’ are said to be behind the cyber attacks. Around 2000 computers bombarded the Visa Website last night, bombarding the host computers with requests for information, causing them to crash.

The attack on MasterCard brought down parts of its website. Shoppers were affected when they were taken to the Securecode website run by MasterCard, which was not authorising transactions so payments could not be completed.

In an interview with BBC Radio, an unofficial spokesman for the group going by the name of “Coldblood” said: “The campaign is not over. It’s still going strong, more and more people are joining and helping in.”

Anonymous claimed Twitter was censoring the #WikiLeaks and #cablegate hashtags in its trends after coming under government pressure. Twitter however officially addressed this in its blog saying the terms were not as popular as previous and thus have not been picked up by the algorithm. The group was kicked off Twitter and Facebook over night for breeching terms of use, although it has reappeared on Twitter under a new name. It is thought Twitter will be the next target after Anonymous posted a status saying ‘Twitter you’re next for censoring WikiLeaks discussion.’

Anonymous however wrote on its website “While we don’t have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons. We want transparency and we counter censorship.”

Facebook Take Location Sharing Into The Mainstream

By Andrew Redfern @ 17th September 2010 3:18 pm Twitter

Social networking site Facebook has launched its location-sharing service Facebook Places in the UK. The service allows Facebook users to “check in” at various locations, including bars, shops, leisure centres, restaurants, and other public places. Once checked in, users can view which of their Facebook friends are checked in at the same place, or have checked in there in the past.

Facebook Places also allows users to view which of their friends have checked into places nearby, as well as attractions and points of interest close to where they have checked in. Once a user has checked in, this will be posted on their news feed, as well as on the Recent Activity section of that specific location’s Places page.

Facebook has designed the Places software so that existing location-sharing services, such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp, can be fully integrated into the Places app.

Speaking at the UK launch of Facebook Places, product manager Michael Sharon said: “We realised that this is something that people do every single day, telling their friends where they are. The natural thing is to build a product that takes advantage of this and makes it easier, more convenient and more social for them to do what they’re already doing.”

Hit Search Director Andrew Redfern commented “Facebook Places will align millions of mobile users with willing businesses looking to promote themselves. The revenue generating opportunities of the having your userbase interacting with your brand at a local level are fascinating.

I feel that Facebook Places will be a roaring success if it manages to get over the obvious privacy questions that will arise in the coming weeks. What this space its going to be an exciting few weeks.”

Having been released in the US last month, Facebook Places is now being rolled-out to UK users over the weekend, with a European roll-out planned for the coming months.

Facebook Places can be accessed using the Facebook for iPhone app, or by visiting the mobile version of the Facebook website through other smartphones. Facebook plans to roll out apps for different phone models, such as Blackberry and Android, in the near future.

Liverpool Top Premiership Twitter League

By Andrew Redfern @ 9th November 2009 7:05 pm Twitter

They may have all but blown their Premiership title hopes on the pitch, but Liverpool have topped at least one table – the Twitter Premier League.

The Merseyside club’s official page on the social networking site has over 55,000 followers, more than twice as many as their bitter rivals Manchester United, who sit in second place with around 22,000 followers.

The “Twitter Premier League” was compiled by online marketing specialists Hit Search, and is proving to be an almost-accurate reflection of the real life Premiership table. The top four places in the Twitter league are currently occupied by the Premiership “big four”.

Arsenal are third in the Twitter league with around 17,000 followers, with Chelsea just behind them in fourth with over 14,000 followers.

Manchester City are thought by many to be the team most likely to break the big four’s stronghold on the Premiership due to their unlimited riches, and their rising is reflected in their fifth place standing in the Twitter League, with just under 8-and-a-half thousand followers.

Next are Aston Villa and Tottenham Hotspur, two teams consistently challenging for top six places on the pitch. Villa are the more popular team on Twitter with over 4,300 followers, but Tottenham are only a few hundred followers behind them with just under 4,000.

At the other end of the table, there are four Premiership clubs who are falling behind in the social networking stakes. Bolton, Hull, Portsmouth and Premiership debutants Burnley all lack an official Twitter page. Of the two other newly promoted clubs, Wolves are well ahead of their regional rivals Birmingham City, with over 1,200 followers compared to Birmingham’s paltry 374.

Hit Search director Andrew Redfern commented: “Recent research suggests that 19% of Internet users now use Twitter to share updates about themselves and by Twitter’s own admission expects to have over 100 million by the end of 2010.”

“In new marketing mediums it is the early adopting brands that benefit most and its clear that certain football clubs will be pushing for the Premiership Twitter League whilst others will be struggling from Twitter relegation!”

The full list, including Twitter usernames and number of followers as of 05/11/2009; The Premiership Twitter League will be updated on a monthly basis.

(1) Liverpool (LFCTV) – 55,183
(2) Manchester United (MUFootballClub) – 22,320
(3) Arsenal (ArsenalDotCom) – 17,658
(4) Chelsea (CFCNEWS) – 14,277
(5) Manchester City (MCFC) – 8,494
(6) Aston Villa (astonvilla) – 4,376
(7) Tottenham Hotspur (thfc) – 3,974
(8) West Ham United (whufc) – 2,290
(9) Everton (YourEverton) – 2,093
(10) Fulham (FulhamFC) – 1,985
(11) Sunderland (SAFCofficial) – 1,622
(12) Stoke City (OfficialSCFC) – 1,359
(13) Wolverhampton Wanderers (OfficialWolves) – 1,237
(14) Blackburn Rovers (OneRovers) – 1,055
(15) Wigan Athletic (LaticsOfficial) – 602
(16) Birmingham City (Official_BCFC) – 374
(17) Bolton Wanderers – n/a
(18) Burnley – n/a
(19) Hull City – n/a
(20) Portsmouth – n/a

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