Biggest Social Media Disasters Ever

In January 2012, McDonald’s promoted two trends #meetthefarmers and #mcdstories in order to promote its brand and engage with customers. However, unfortunately people started posting their horror stories at the fast food chain through the second of those hashtags. The idea is that McDonald’s actually paid to promote a trend that caused a bad publicity for them.

Snicker’s ran an ad campagin in which they paid a number of celebrities in the UK to tweet pictures of themselves eating Snickers bars. However, this was not acceptable to UK’s Office of Fair Trading according to which companies need to clearly elucidate when a product is being promoted. The OFT started an investigation into the Twitter ads however Snickers was not found guilty of practicing any unlawful activity, in the end.

In a promotion, American Apparel offered 20% off for those who suffered due to Hurricane Sandy however it had a very bad impact on people and they took no time in criticizing the ad on twitter and other social network.

In order to take advantage of a trending topic , CelebBoutique, an online store, posted a promotional tweet with the Aurora hashtag however they could not read up on why Aurora was trending which resulted the tweet to be an extremely thoughtless one.

When President Obama talked about his grandmother in the first presidential debate in October, Kitchen Aid’s, a kitchen appliance manufacturer, reacted by tweeting following to its 24,000 followers: “Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! She died 3 days b4 he became president. #nbcpolitics”
They however removed the tweet very soon and issued an apology with an explanation that a member of the KitchenAid team by mistake posted this tweet from the company account instead posing it through his personal account.