PR or Public Relations is usually a slick operation with well managed corporate messages and sleek running social media campaigns gathering sizeable click through rates for all clients right?......wrong!
On your coffee break … have some light relief. Check out these recent PR faux-pas.
McDonalds
Firstly remember the #McDStories that took off like a duck landing on a frozen lake without reverse thrust.
MacDonalds according to BusinessInsider a twitter campaign by McDonald's backfired when people started sharing the wrong kind of #McDStories (via @bored2tears).McDonald's kicked things off with the hashtag #MeetTheFarmers, in a campaign meant to draw attention to the brand's guarantee of fresh produce.
Later in the day, however, the burger company used a dangerously vague hashtag: "When u make something w/ pride, people can taste it," McD potato supplier #McDstories
You can guess what happened next! Stories of fingernails in their Bigmacs was probably one of the milder ones.
Blackberry
The second has got to be the recent Blackberry outage. In hindsight we know that the company like Nokia is facing some real problems going forward with the likes of Samsung and Apple about but it seemed like a pretty big deal at the time.
The Huffington Post reported…There could not have been a more bitter irony than a company that built an empire on smartphones and instant messaging standing accused of being no good at communication?
That’s the situation Research In Motion finds itself in, following a four-day outage of its email and BlackBerry messenger services. The backlog of emails and IMs that began with a switching failure at RIM’s Slough, England, office and led to cascading failures around the world has market analysts and BlackBerry fans worried the company may have dealt itself a near-fatal public relations blow at a time when it can least afford it. Oh dear.
