McDonald’s

Live From the War Room April 19th


In case you missed the news, McDonald’s had a National Hiring Event April 19th when they recruited 50,000 new employees from the front counter to the home office. We are tremendously excited for this event and the overwhelming response that we’ve received from prospective employees and media.

With this post, I wanted to lift the tent slightly and share a little about how we are managing the communications for this event. As you can imagine, the planning and communications out to the Field (McDonald’s speak for the 14,000 restaurants and thousands of employees around the country that make our operations run smoothly) has been going on for months.

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A Quiet Night Under the Arches

I know it has been a fortnight or more since I’ve posted, but I wanted to get back to the blog and talk about the multitude of activities going on at McDonald’s USA.

I am now 7 months in to my new role and feel I’ve gotten my sea legs on the massive and ever rolling ship that is McDonald’s. So what is going on?

TONS.

If you live under a rock, you might not know that the Mc Rib is back. Through a careful mix of pre-seeding and launch activities, we’ve been able to generate a HUGE amount of chatter about the national return of my personal favorite menu item…that is if you count Wall Street Journal, Colbert, John Stewart, USA Today, Google Trends, Yahoo Hot News and a few hundred millions other traditional and social media posts a big deal.

McRib turned in to a trending topic on Twitter (before our promoted trend) on Google and Yahoo (twice). Oh, and Bill Clinton also talked about how excited he was about it.

McRib was also our first test of promoted Tweets and Trends. Yes, there were some negative tweets, but there were nothing compared to the huge majority of fans showing uber excited about the return of McRib. Fortune had a great write up on this subject:

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/11/17/why-it-doesn’t-mcmatter-if-you-dont-like-the-mcrib/

Beyond McRib, we had a great pilot program with Farmville. Great meaning engagement of many millions more than expected.

Our Facebook places launch is raising $50,000 for charity and our virtual hands program is kicking in another $10,000.

Once things settle down, I hope to post more about each program.

Rick Wion

McDonald’s Foursquare Day Campaign Increased Checkins by 33%

Golden Arches
Click image to see full post on Mashable
You probably already saw this via Mashable (which gets a tad more traffic than my blog) but in case not, I wanted to share the case study of how we were able to use Foursquare to increase foot traffic while showing real ROI.

A huge thanks to Miss Destructo www.missdestructo.com and Dr. Nate www.brighteyesnews.com/ who made Foursquare Day possible.

Rick Wion first #MarketerMonday Chat Guest!

This evening at 8:00pm eastern marked the launch of the #MarketerMonday Chat utilizing hashtag #MMchat and Rick Wion @rdublife, Director of Social Media for McDonald’s was the first SPECIAL guest on the chat!

Tweetchat was hosted by yours truly @JeffAshcroft aka @TheSocialCMO and our topic was Social Media Alignment. Check out the full transcript of the chat which was lively with many great questions from the 77 people who joined in the chat posting almost 400 tweets! The only thing better than the questions were Rick’s insightful and interesting answers provided from his unique perspective as the Director, Social Media for McDonald’s.

Next Monday August 3rd, @TedRubin of #Opensky will be our second #MarketerMonday Chat SPECIAL guest and Relationship Commerce: Return on Relationship (ROR) will be the topic!

A SPECIAL thank you to Rick Wion for joining us and making this launch a very memorable evening indeed! And thanks to all of you who participated and please feel free to comment below on our inaugural #MarketerMonday Chat!

Cheers

Jeff Ashcroft

@TheSocialCMO