wow. great example of how to do it right. <— #McDStories

thedailywhat:

McBacklash of the Day: McDonald’s this week become the latest fast-food giant to learn an important lesson about trying to force a Twitter hashtag meme based on a marketing campaign.

That lesson? Don’t.

You’d think Wendy’s failed attempt to make #HeresTheBeef happen would have prevented McDonald’s from making the same mistake with #McDStories, but you’d think wrong.

After Mickey D’s official Twitter feed tweeted an self-congratulatory quote attributed to a “McD potato supplier” (since deleted) along with the hashtag #McDStories, it didn’t take long for Twitter users to turn the trend-forcing on its face and offer up their own, less flattering “McD Stories.”

#McDStories quickly became a gushing stream of badvertising. Until this morning, that is — when it turned into a gushing stream of news stories about how badly McDonald’s failed.

[dailydot / @natebramble.]

God Bless social media. 

Global supermarket giant Tesco solved the problem of enticing hard-working, time-strapped Koreans into its stores by bringing the shopping experience to them, with virtual stores based in subways and metro stations.

Shoppers were encouraged to browse life-like images of supermarket shelves with their smartphones and scan the QR codes on products to add them to their shopping carts, all whilst waiting for the metro. Their purchases would then be delivered to them at home, with no need to carry heavy bags.

Read more about creative uses for QR codes in marketing here.

Do you remember when jet blue launched that unlimited flying pass sale for all the cities you can fly to in 30 days for $599? Well I do. And I also remember contemplating it for a millisecond, counting all the places i could reasonable go to in that short amount of time to make it more than worthwhile. It took me less than a minute to decide it wasn’t worth that sort of hectic travel pace not to mention I was too broke to go anyways.

But it seems a lot of people did jump on it. In fact so much so that Jet Blue ran out of the limited quantities of passes in a week and a half and had to cancel their planned advertising campaign because of the high demand. They said a day after the sale went up traffic to the route map went up 700%. Moreover, there appears to be a smart few who took advantage of the price point and capitalized on the rare opportunity by using themselves as marketing tools to get as much as they possibly could out of it. And so was born 12 Hours in a City. A blog written by 2 college friends who each bought a pass and managed to get sponsors and fans in the 2 weeks they’ve actually been doing it. There’s also a blog by another guy who was hired by Wired to travel from airport to airport for a straight month without ever leaving the airport. He goes by the Moniker Terminal Man.

All this makes me start thinking about creative low cost ways you can use marketing to your own advantage. Kind of makes my head spin a little. With twitter gaining momentum and more and more people jumping on the blogging bandwagon its seems almost foolish not to sniff out where marketing trends are headed today. Ahh..makes me wish I were a little more entreprenurial. I’m sure it wouldn’t take much to figure something out..