Mark Stuart,
Insight Executive,
Yomego
McDonalds
Fast-food giant, McDonald’s, takes 25th place in our SMR league table. When compared to its 6th place in the Interbrand Top 100 Brands list, this might be seen as a poor performance but their SMR score reinforces its position as market leader in its sector with KFC its nearest rival sitting just outside our top 50 (54th place).
McDonald’s appointed Rick Wion as its first Director of Social Media in April 2010, having joined them back in 2006. Creation of the new position underlined the client’s commitment to social channels and Wion’s first move was to reach out to 'mummy bloggers', an interesting approach considering the upcoming World Cup in South Africa (sponsored by McDonald’s for a fifth time).
The official McDonald’s Facebook presence doesn’t appear to be a major priority yet. Twitter (@McDonalds) is regularly updated by the in-house team, with a link to each contributor revealing a personal profile on the McDonald’s website (aboutmcdonalds.com). With 80k followers, the content is starting to gain some traction but it’s fair to say the brand is still finding its feet in social spaces.
This is perhaps unsurprising as the brand has plenty of potential detractors, all hungry for McDonald’s to make a mistake (see McSucks.com). But ignoring social is not an option for a consumer-facing brand of this size. Negative sentiment is already out there. But if strong content, transparency, responsiveness and effective community management are combined with clever monitoring, McDonald’s should target a jump in next year’s league table.
NMA Opinion
McDonald’s approach so far has been to listen, making the brand a willing conversationalist while activating engagement, but not attempting to become an overnight hero in launching the next Whopper Sacrifice campaign or Ikea’s work on Facebook. There’s still a long way to go, however, as it recently made a claim that a Foursquare promotion resulted in a 33% increase in store traffic, whereas in fact it was just a surge in check-ins. Those who love McDonald’s will happily click a like button for a specific product, but whether that’s truly valuable is up for debate.
