So perhaps you’re already heard this or maybe you have not but the McDonalds Hashtag #McDstories was created with the intention of getting people to share their good experiences with McDonalds. However, turns out that there are a lot of bad stories people can share as well.
LESSON: before you try to create your own company/brand hashtag to ‘engage’ your customers, you might want to create a worst-case scenario in your mind as to how it could backfire.
In this case, I don’t think Rick Wion, or whomever came up with this grand idea was thinking when they launched this push for engagement with the hashtag.
But, thanks to Rick, now we all know how critical it is to take the following steps when coming up with a brand engagement hashtag strategy:
1. Make the hashtag short enough (ideally 8 characters or less) – this always holds true.
2. Make the hashtag make sense for what you’re trying to communicate. There are plenty of good examples of this, just take a look at things that consistently are trending on twitter.
3. Think of the worst case scenario it could create. For example, #mcdstories – I’m sure a lot of people have had bad things happen to their food. WIth that many locations, something’s gotta give.
So, at the end of the day, thank you Rick for helping us out with this lesson.
Fore more coverage, for those of you who aren’t aware, see below.
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