Recognising the power of the social media: reflection on McDonald

McDonald’s is one of the laggards among the large companies in recognising and exploiting the social media. The fast food brand is a household name and is commonly mentioned in the social media as users discuss their experiences with the brand. But it was for a long time unable to make good use of these discussions since it had no way of monitoring what was being said about it. But McDonald’s made a change to this in 2014 when it embraced technology and sought to exploit the social media to its advantage. But despite its lateness in coming into the social media field, McDonald’s has demonstrated excellence in strategic agility and management in terms of responding to needs of the consumers that have been expressed via the social media.

The approach taken by McDonald’s was based on the perspective of capacity building. This is very important in strategic management where the organisation must determine what it needs to do and determine whether it has the capabilities needed to do it. The company needed to be able to monitor consumer sentiments over the social media and determined that it needed to have a strong analytical capacity. In line with this, it opted to recruit over 200 specialists that are already versed with the social media and online communications.

One of the main results of this adjustment was determination of concern by social media users that breakfast at McDonald’s was not being served long enough. The complaint was that breakfast could only be served until 10.30am. Through the analytics, McDonald’s determined that the concern was widespread and opted to introduce an all-day breakfast package. The change was hailed as positive and responsive to the needs of the consumers; hence strengthening the relationship between the brand and its customers.

The other result of the analytics was the finding that response was often low and sometimes negative whenever the organisation made advertisements using photos that have been edited for publishing. This finding was in line with the fact that millennials are highly resistant to manipulations. They prefer real images and content and are ready to tolerate mistakes and imperfections just as they are in the real world. They do not find it amusing when brands try to brainwash them with images of perfection when such perfection is yet to be actually achieved. In fact this is one of the loopholes in strategic marketing where the traditional approach to marketing continues to be dominant with marketers trying hard to paint a picture of perfection as envisioned. Millennials want to see the mistakes committed as they would in the real world. This is what McDonald’s was able to do. They focused on real-life moments in their restaurants; capturing all the good and the non-so-good moments. The result was positive. Brand engagement over the social media increased tremendously and the brand was able to bounce back using the social media.

McDonald’s social media monitoring team is based on three digital media hubs. These are based in London, Oak Brook, and Illinois.