McDonald's: Finding the "Voice of McDonald's" — Live from BlogWell

1:30 — Kurt Vanderah introduces McDonald’s Manager of Global Web Communications, Joe Curry.

1:31 — Kurt: First, I’d like to thank our sponsor, Marketwire for being here and supporting our event.

1:32 — Joe is here to talk about their use of social media for their global singing competition, Voice of McDonald’s.

1:33 — Joe: Imagine you are Jesus Molinarez from Peru. After entering a global singing contest, you have made it to the semifinals. There are 14,000 people in the audience. You’ve had the training, you’ve taken choreography lessons, and you’ve spent time practicing with the band. And now, the crowd is getting fired up to so see YOU — not some famous celebrity — they want to see Jesus from Peru.

1:34 — Joe explains the goals of the social media in campaign for Voice of McDonald’s: Increase awareness of unique opportunities, increase awareness of public online voting, share finalists’ stories, and use campaign as a case study for future social media efforts.

1:37 — Joe shows a slide of their online voting site. Here, finalists have equal presence with rotating videos. People can come to the site and watch these videos, and then vote on their favorites.

1:38 — The results: McDonald’s had 10,451 total entries from 51 countries. On the website, they linked to social media sites. Also, each semifinalist had links to their own specific content. Joe: Include website links on everything!

1:41 — Joe: With internal networks, the goal was to spread the word. With external networks, we used corporate-led social media channels.

Joe: We used Facebook to offer a place for conversation. We learned people gravitate to Facebook and that it is a good idea to focus on 1 or 2 sites at a time.

Joe: On YouTube, we posted a music video and several promotional videos. People also posted their own videos. There were 110 total videos posted, and people were able to give feedback through comments. We had 92,000 total video views, and we learned that the semifinalists loved the comments!

1:43 – Joe: The goal with Twitter was to spread the word with real-time updates from the finals. With this, there were minimal results overall, but we did get music artist feedback that made it worth it to the contestants.

We also used Flickr to share background information about semifinalists.

1:44 — Joe then explains the creation of semifinalist tool kits. People could use these tool kits to develop a presence specific to their country. Joe: we gave people suggestions, keywords, tags, etc. to help them promote semifinalists through social media.

1:45 — The outcome was that there were 685,985 votes and 1.1 million video views during the Voice of McDonald’s campaign — a huge increase from the previous year. With social media, we were able to increase awareness and gain more news coverage than before.

1:47 –Additional takeaways: The earlier you plan, the better the results; get buy-in early from Legal — it makes life easier when you have full support; employees are often your best brand ambassadors — this campaign was about activating employees all over the world; Make content easy to share

1: 49 — Joe: So how can we increase awareness for Voice of McDonald’s 4? We are currently in discussion about this.

Q&A

Q: Since this campaign was worldwide, what cultural sensitivities did you consider?

A: Joe: We didn’t run into many problems since people were enthusiastic about promoting finalists. We did run into one problem where someone couldn’t access the site in China, but other than that people were very enthusiastic.

Q: Kurt: Can you talk about success metrics you used?

A: Joe: Voice of McDonald’s was a rallying opportunity. When you get to Orlando, it’s hard to describe the excitement from all of the countries cheering on the semifinalists. They are really good. Very talented. Great event.

Q: Justin Fogarty from Ariba: Can you tell more about the tool kits you created?

A: Joe: The tool kits were prescriptive. We gave people the social media channels we were supporting and let them know how to use them. Some people took a more low-tech approach. One contestant got people to come to his local library to vote for him. The important thing was to try to keep it all uniform so it looked integrated and consistent, even though contestants came from all over the world.

Q: Kurt: Can you explain the importance of telling a story — telling about people’s personal backgrounds and whatnot?

A: Joe: We offered a well-rounded experience and gave people lots of information about contestants. Joe gives an example of the story of a Michigan contestant and how it impacted the restaurant and its customers. Joe: We wanted to show people what else the contestants liked to do in their lives outside of the competition — information about their family, their passions, and their dreams.

Q: Matt from Pipeline Media Relations: With all the departments you coordinated with, how did you get everyone on the same page with your social media efforts?

A: Joe: We collaborated with global HR and global marketing, and we had cross-functional team meetings with these groups. Mostly, the attitude around this campaign was positive, so we didn’t run into many issues. We just tried to update people and keep them in the loop.

Q: Stephanie from Advocate Health Care: Where did the idea for Voice come from?

A: Joe: We decided to do this in 2005. We picked music because it is the universal language that people can connect with around the world. It’s something people can feel good about.