Introduction
The social media can prove to be one of the effective and useful tools for the business purpose that can bring lots of advantages like engagement with the audiences, boosting of the website traffic and more. The assignment highlights the overall measures of MacDonald’s towards its media relations and its activities in the platform of social media lie the twitter towards increasing its business profitability. The thesis statement for this assignment is to recognise the consequences of MacDonald’s while using social media, development of positive relation with the media and finally the effective strategies for media campaigns.
1.There are lots of disadvantages of the usage of social media platform by the business organization (Kohli, Suri and Kapoor 2015). One of the relevant examples is the negative feedback and poor ratings of the company profile. Some of the business benefit towards the effective use of social media includes
Awareness of brand – The compelling and the relevant content via the social media platform will attract the attention of the potential customers together with helping them towards increase in brand visibility of the business organization.
The brand reputation – Improvement in the business can be done by responding to the developments of the industrial sector and by the responses of the public.
Cost effective – The platform of social media is much more cheap in comparison to the advertisements and the activities of promotion that are available on daily or regular basis. This is because the cost incurred for the maintenance of the presence of social media is nominal and follows the budget of the organization.
Trafficking of the website – The content of the social media helps in boosting the traffic of the webpage of the organization (Hudson et al. 2016). This furthermore helps in increased online conversations leading to sales.
Evaluation – Paid social advertising determines the rate of generated sales
Interaction with the customers – Positive feedbacks in the social media platform helps in the attraction of new consumers whereas negative feedback highlights the areas for improvement.
The loyalty of the brand – Building relationship with the consumers in the platform of social media helps the business unit grow and flourish towards increased loyalty and advocacy.
2.The large audience and the consumer definitely play a very essential role in the success of the McDonald’s overall ranking in the social media platform (Kane 2015). With approximately 70 million followers across the regions and countries, the company uses the enormous following as a token of amplifies for the activities in the social media platform.
The different audience that McDonald's required to keep in their mind during the social media campaigns is the positive as well as the negative recipients. While the positive recipients generally consists of the younger, college goers who love to eat fast foods, working parents who do not have much of the time to cook for the family, singles who live alone and are too lazy to cook. Some of the other people who tend to love the company’s food are the individuals on road trips and travelers by heart. The group of people or audience who are more likely to have negative reactions to the company’s product are the health conscious people, the animal rights activists, people who had bad experiences at McDonald’s, the environmentalists, the vegetarians. Some of the other negative recipients are the competing companies in the market like the Burger King, the Wendy’s, the KFC and the people who are extremely loyal to these brand chains (Zhu, Anagondahalli and Zhang 2017). While a large number of audience and customer is not at all enough towards the guarantee of the presence of strong social media, McDonald’s uses several other tactics and strategies for ensuring their increasing participation and brand image in the social media platform.
3.As a part of the social media twitter campaigns of McDonald’s, introduction of certain communication strategy and the recording of series of commercials featuring healthy grown raw materials for the products which contributes as fairy traditional drivers to attract customers who had negative opinions and thought about the product of the company are some of the mastermind ideas of Wion and his team. They furthermore utilized twitter promoted trends and changed the promoted keywords for getting more engagement with the social media trends (Holt 2016). The team also monitored towards ensuring the online activity of the twitter much closely for the quick discovery under the newly introduced feature of hash tags. Wion and his team furthermore aimed towards the awareness of the brand towards the online environment. The motto of the team has been to get updated for the upcoming McDonald’s social media and twitter campaigns and contingency plans to the execution of planned conversations, therefore, altering the capability for the changed mindset which in turn helps the company from taking the negative comments sportingly and improving their production
4.It is helpful for McDonald’s to develop a brief communication plan since it serves as the roadmap towards helping them reach their goals of the program. Effective communication plans come with strategic measures and communication objectives that encourage better relations of the media and accurate reporting.
Reflecting the social media campaign Wion stated that since the measures had been not gone according to the plan. It is important to develop an effective communication plan for the proper encouragement of the better media relations for the growth of the company.
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The Communication Plan Template
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Timing
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In response to the twitter comments of the date of January 4, 2012, which was noticed as the day where some of the negative media converges surrounded the company’s media campaign, Wion stated that the time frame for the communication plan should range around 2-4 months.
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Audience
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Since McDonald’s have both positive and negative audiences, it is important for the organization to target the issues and the concerns of the negative audiences so that they can be solved or improved. McDonald’s should introduce innovative measures and strategies to attract the negative customers (Pfeffer, Zorbach and Carley 2014). Furthermore investing in the already existing customers is a smart move that the company should opt for increasing the rate of customer loyalty towards its product and services.
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Sender
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The communication template should be sent by the McDonald's management and HR.
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Key Message
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The main points for the communication plan are:
· Tracking of the press coverage
· Fast answers and actions towards the feedbacks received
· Innovative strategies to connect with the media for spreading of the message
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Desired Outcome
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Accurate communication, effective, efficient and lasting efforts and measures, organizational development, increase in profit margin, high media coverage and brand recognition (Jin, Liu and Austin 2014).
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Medium
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Choosing the right networks, giving importance to visual branding, developing the voice, consistent topics, regular activities, connecting with the influencers, promotion of the profiles and effective engagement.
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Materials
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Abstract, overly formal communication or language, colloquialism and personal conflicts in the workplace (Alves, Fernandes and Raposo 2016)
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Frequency
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Messages and responses should be done on regular basis to encourage customer satisfaction.
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Conclusion
MacDonald’s like all other companies from different parts of the world aims to adapt the platform of social media for blooming up its business. Public relations, marketing, customer services are some of the factors that the company needs to focus for initiating daily communication that will provide opportunities for participation and engagement. The assignment focuses on the importance of the design of social media campaigns for MacDonald’s for the encouragement of better media relations and more accurate reporting.
References
Alves, H, Fernandes, C & Raposo, M 2016, ‘Social media marketing: a literature review and implications’, Psychology & Marketing, vol. 33, no.12, pp.1029-1038.
Holt, D 2016, ‘Branding in the age of social media’, Harvard business review, vol. 94, no.3, pp.40-50.
Hudson, S, Huang, L, Roth, MS & Madden, TJ 2016, ‘The influence of social media interactions on consumer–brand relationships: A three-country study of brand perceptions and marketing behaviors’, International Journal of Research in Marketing, vol.33, no.1, pp.27-41.
Jin, Y, Liu, BF & Austin, LL 2014, ‘Examining the role of social media in effective crisis management: The effects of crisis origin, information form, and source on publics’ crisis responses’, Communication research, vol. 41, no.1, pp.74-94.
Kane, GC 2015, ‘Enterprise social media: Current capabilities and future possibilities’, MIS Quarterly Executive, vol.14, no.1.
Kohli, C, Suri, R & Kapoor, A 2015, ‘Will social media kill branding?’, Business Horizons, vol.58, no.1, pp.35-44.
Pfeffer, J, Zorbach, T & Carley, KM 2014, ‘Understanding online firestorms: Negative word-of-mouth dynamics in social media networks’, Journal of Marketing Communications, vol. 20,no.1-2, pp.117-128.
Zhu, L, Anagondahalli, D & Zhang, A 2017, ‘Social media and culture in crisis communication: McDonald’s and KFC crises management in China’, Public Relations Review, vol.43, no.3, pp.487-492.
