McDonald's & Content Marketing

Content Marketing

Content marketing is different from advertising. As Rebecca Lieb of Ad Age said, content resides on owned or earned media. Owned media is what a company owns like their website. Earned media is user generated content like comments on Facebook or Twitter. Content marketing doesn't interrupt people like normal advertising, for example, sometimes an ad appears before it allows you to watch a YouTube video. For content marketing the potential customer has to go and look for the content of the company (like go to their Twitter or Facebook page).

Justin Pearse wrote an article in the Guardian called "Why Brands Need to Avoid the Hype Surrounding Content Marketing". He says that companies should focus on their customers' needs and values. They should not produce content just for the sake of making content.

McDonald's Did it Wrong!

In January 2012, McDonald's launched a twitter campaign and they promoted a hashtag. The hashtag was McDStories, Which was about the farmers who grow McDonald's food. McDonald's was expecting to hear nice and warm comments from people but it didn't turn out that way. People started to tweet negative comments and make fun of the company.

Sample tweets from "#McDStories: When A Hashtag Becomes A Bashtag"

Like Justin Pearse said, there should be a customer need that the content is fulfilling. In #McDStories, there's no customer need being fulfilled or if there is, it's not clear. 

At the end of the Forbes article "#McDStories: When A Hashtag Becomes A Bashtag" it's interesting that the top comment is from Rick Wion, the Director of Social Media at McDonald's USA. It shows that they're engaged in showing their side of the story.


McDonald's Did it Right!


McDonald's launched a campaign in Canada called "Our Food, Your Questions". People can go to the webpage and ask questions about McDonald's through their Facebook or Twitter accounts. Since they started this campaign they answered 8802 questions. 

I think this idea is brilliant. This campaign fulfills a need that customers have. McDonald's is a fast food restaurant and fast food has a bad reputation. Many customers have concerns about the quality of the food and if it's unhealthy. Usually companies don't want to answer these kinds of questions because they don't want to highlight that their product might be bad for their consumers. With the website linked to Twitter/Facebook, they were able to create a large amount of engagement and, by having their questions answered, customers trust in the company increases.

The big difference between this campaign and the #McDStories campaign is that they have complete control over the message. They don't accept every question but they do answer a huge amount of questions. I think McDonald's should run this campaign in the US as well.