Okay. So you’ve read my post “One Glaringly Obvious Way McDonald’s Has Failed at FourSquare“, and you were with me in thinking they had dropped the ball and made themselves look bad. But I’m here to tell you how awesome they are.
Soon after I posted the aforementioned blog article, and I mean within a few hours, I received an email from the Director of Social Media at McDonald’s. Really? Yes. Really. This man apologized, which is good for any brand to do, but he wanted to know which store I had visited so he could personally make sure this store was properly educated about FourSquare and its promotions, or how to delete them, if they wanted to. He even offered me some coupons. Twice.
By taking responsibility for the bad experience, Rick, the Social Media Director, not only made up for the situation, but he gave me a little faith in businesses as large as his employer. Sometimes, we think “Oh, they get tweets, comments, and bad press all the time, they’ll never see my post.” and to be honest, I didn’t even think about it. When I made my post, I was simply trying to use it as an example of how a situation such as mine could make a customer want to look elsewhere. When I saw the email waiting in my inbox, I had no idea what to think. After sending two responses, and getting a reply, I was over the moon with excitement. This wasn’t someone from a call center, or some guy in a cubicle somewhere, just doing his job. This was the director of social media for McDonald’s, USA. He made it his business to know how he could help. He didn’t assign it to someone. He didn’t just ignore it.
This experience renewed my faith in big brands being “human”. Yes, they do get tons and tons of mentions, shout outs, comments, and bad press, but they are paying attention! They do actually want us to have a good experience. If all brands could take this story and learn from it, we wouldn’t have so many bad experiences with social media and our favorite places (ahem, Applebee’s, anyone?).
Thanks Rick, and thank you, everyone, for reading!