#McDStories & The Dark Side of Social Media: When Hashtags Become Bashtags

While social media gives companies the opportunity to promote itself and engage with it's customers, the reality is that the social media universe isn't always rainbows and sunshine. In reality, social media users control social media - not companies. Social media really is a two-way street and often times your social media initiative - like using a simple hashtag can quickly turn against you if you're not careful. 

Enter the bashtag - that worst-case-scenario where your seemingly innocent hashtag is highjacked with messages that don't resonate with your brand and turn your social media campaign on its head. A bashtag is defined as:

"...the use of an organization's hashtag in a negative, critical, or abusive fashion. In the majority of cases, the hashtag being hijacked is one used in a corporate marketing campaign but can extend any organization."

Here we learn that social media really is a double-edge sword. Just as a company can tweet a hashtag - so can everyone else. The most obvious case of the hashtag turned bashtag is undoubtedly McDonalds' #McDStories social media catastrophe. Here are a couple of the most infamous of the #McDStories bashtags (There's so many to choose from.)

So, what do you do when this happens? Are bashtags simply a fact of social media life? The truth is, there isn't a ton of literature out there about what to do and how to avoid such an occurrence. However, here are two of the most important tips (although they do have more) that I found from a few bloggers including Shama Kabani, Rashmi Jha and Benjamin Rieder!

1) Know your role

I hate to say it but how could McDonalds not have known they were a perfect target for something like this? Even people who indulge in their food (why, I'll never know) still make fun of it. Everyone has a fast-food story. Everyone. I can't help but think that brands like McDonalds are so much more vulnerable to this type of hashtag highjacking than a brand like Apple and therefore need to be much more cautious when they embark on a campaign that allows others to share their stories.

2) Prepare for the worst!

Like all things in life nothing is never guaranteed to go as planned. Things can go awry. Hashtags can quickly become bashtags. In light of this, companies must be able to think of the worst possible outcomes and create a contingency plan in order to deal with any possible backlash.

In the case of McDonalds, their social media director Rick Wion issued a formal statement and expressed that they had set up a plan in the event that things didn't go as planned:

"Within an hour of pulling #McDStories the number of conversations about it fell off from a peak of 1600 to a few dozen. It is also important to keep those numbers in perspective. There were 72,788 mentions of McDonald’s overall that day so the traction of #McDStories was a tiny percentage (2%) of that.

“With all social media campaigns, we include contingency plans should the conversation not go as planned. The ability to change midstream helped this small blip from becoming something larger."

Not only did McDonalds have a plan, but they acted almost immediately. And sometimes acting promptly could mean the difference between a small "blip", as Wion suggests, or a possible catastrophe - which I would argue this was for McDonalds.

So what have we learned? That the social media universe can be a scary place. User generated content does not always work to a brand's advantage. Something as simple as a hashtag can prove to have irreversible - and damaging - affects on a brand's image which is why knowing your role and preparing for the worst are important in order to avoid a hashtag highjacking!