McDonald’s Wins Twitter Followers with “McWinning”

Back in early March, McLobster was a trending topic on Twitter, and it was one McDonald’s director of social media Rick Wion hoped would go away. It wasn’t that the fast-food giant didn’t want people tweeting about the lobster salad sandwich’s sporadic appearance on its menus in Maine and Eastern Canada over the last few years. But some of the things people were tweeting about it weren’t things Wion would say to his mother.

Wion’s social media team tweeted that McDonald’s had no plans to bring back the McLobster, but it fell on deaf ears and McLobster was a trending topic for a second straight day. But then came up with a winner of a tweet that put an end to the McLobster nastiness:

“Despite all the rumors, there r no plans 2 bring #mclobster or mcsushi to the US menu. We r working on a new menu item called McWinning.”

Speaking at Realtime NY in New York on Monday, Wion said he took a chance that something fun and timely – actor Charlie Sheen had just started tweeting and made the hashtag “winning” all the buzz – would get tweeters to lay off the McLobster.

Not only did it do that, it made McDonald’s the talk of the Twittersphere and the mainstream media.

“The tweet itself took off,” Wion said. “The negative chatter about McLobster was done within an hour, and people on Twitter saw we had a sense of humor.”

In less than two weeks, the McWinning tweet had more than 15,000 retweets (including one by Charlie Sheen), the public-relations equivalent of more than $20 million in impressions, thousands of appreciative responses and just one customer complaint, Wion said.

The McDonald’s team of 12 social media marketers has been tweeting since September 2009 and has more than 135,000 followers. It sends more than 6,000 tweets per week, replies to 3,000 tweets a week, and is mentioned more than 100,000 times per week.

With that kind of experience, it’s easy to see why McDonald’s can do the right things on Twitter.

Wion credited a team member named Katie for appeasing one tweeter whose bad experience with McDonald’s could have been catastrophic to the brand. A tweeter named @allthingsfadra wasn’t thrilled when her super-hero-loving 6-year-old son found a “Littlest Pet Shop” toy in his Happy Meal instead of a toy for little boys.

So instead of going back to her local McDonald’s location, she tweeted about the fiasco.

“It may seem like no big deal to a lot of people, but if you have a 6-year-old boy, you can understand the meltdown,” Wion said.

Katie responded and tweeted allthingsfadra a “You Tweeted, We Listened” card and mailed her and her son, Evan, a hand-written letter of apology and an appropriate superhero toy.

Little did Wion and his team know at the time that the tweeter was also a mommy blogger, who wrote a positive post about McDonald’s efforts on her site, AllThingsFadra.com.

“Now she’s on Twitter defending us when someone has something negative to tweet about us,” Wion said. “And that’s all because of one interaction we had with her. Twitter can help to put a human face on a brand.”