Recently, McDonalds Canada won a Webby Award for their interactive campaign, “Our food. Your questions.” The purpose of the interactive campaign was not only to debunk rumors made about the quality of their food, but also to make McDonalds transparent to their consumers. And it was a success – an interactive campaign done right.
Something important I have come across this week is the importance of staying loyal brand values of a company. As our class is beginning to work on creating an ad campaign for Hotels.com, staying loyal to Hotels.com values is something we must keep in mind.
On Monday morning, an unknown source hacked into the Burger King twitter account and changed all the branding to McDonald’s and released inappropriate tweets, that barely made any sense. The tweets began early Monday morning and lasted a few hours before the account was shut down. Managing a brand account is extremely difficult and Burger King reacted quickly to the incident. Burger King released this statement to the media:
“We have worked directly with administrators to suspend the account until we are able to re-establish our legitimate site and authentic postings. We apologize to our fans and followers who have been receiving erroneous tweets about other members of our industry and additional inappropriate topics.”
McDonald’s released a tweet to the public, as well, because it also reflected poorly on them. McDonald’s tweeted:
“We empathize with our @BurgerKing counterparts. Rest assured, we had nothing to do with the hacking.”
It is interesting to see companies get sabotaged over social media because it is something so new to our generation. What makes it scary is that it goes viral in just seconds to over millions of people who are your loyal customers following you. While this wasn’t the greatest thing to happen, it actually could have an upside. Burger King saw an increase of more than 30,000 followers as well as several media mentions. Individuals quickly heard about the hacked tweets and wanted to see and know what was being said. I mean, who doesn’t love the Whopper?
Companies should take this opportunity and learn from it, especially since Jeep was hacked as well. In order to avoid future hackings companies should change their passwords regularly and always always always have a procedure in place to stop an attack in its tracks!