Social Media Strategy & Poor Execution

Last week in my Social Media Marketing class, we discussed McDonald's recent McFail on Twitter. Someone mentioned that a good social media campaign can't compensate for a poor brand strategy or experience and will probably just amplify it.

This week I experienced exactly that. What I describe below wasn't a terrible experience as much as it wasn't the type of experience you would want a first-time customer to have following a social media campaign. 

I invited a friend to visit a local restaurant Tuesday afternoon because I saw a promotion another friend had posted on Twitter. To be clear, the only reason I visited this restaurant was because of the following tweet:



Obviously this restaurant was trying to gain new customers during its slow time in the day, and it worked. It got me there.

The visit got off to a poor start when the first employee to serve us said she wouldn't accept the promotion because the deal had been for Monday only. At first I was embarrassed but after closely reviewing the tweet which I had retweeted hours earlier I noticed the original tweet had been on the Tuesday we visited. The employee called the manager over, and the manager agreed that there was to be no promotion on this day. After a few awkward moments, the manager said they would call the owner to get more information. The owner told the employees we had to be hospital employees to get the deal (no mention of hospital employees in the tweet), but he would check it out and call back later. That left us again waiting awkwardly for permission to order our food with the promotion price. Eventually the manager caved and gave us the deal. We had waited for about 10 minutes before ordering our food.

Unfortunately for us and this restaurant, the hits kept coming. Here is a list of some of the other minor issues that led to a negative brand experience:

1. The employees were not empowered to make their own decision. This included the owner (see above).
2. The cash register had a sign advertising free drinks if customers texted in a code. We were told we couldn't do this promotion only after having sent text messages. The sign didn't show any conditions for the promotion.
3. By this point I was too afraid to ask for water (which was hidden behind the counter with the other fountain drinks).
4. The cashier did not accept American Express; this of course isn't a big deal, but I was beginning to get tired of being told no.
5. Customers have to get napkins from behind the counter. This is annoying halfway through your meal when your hands are covered in sauce and you were only given one small napkin with your order.  Is it really too expensive to put napkins out where customers can conveniently use them?  I have seen other restaurants do this and do not understand it.
6. My friend was given a fortune cookie; they forgot to give me one. Again, not a big deal independent of other issues.
7. My order was wrong. They kindly fixed this, but the mistakes were piling up at this point.
8. The food tasted old. We drove past a similar establishment with more traffic to get to this restaurant. My assumption is that more customer traffic would lead to fresher food.

I drove by the restaurant again at 6:10 pm later that night and at 6:20 pm tonight. There wasn't a single customer there during either dinner hour. 

I know some of the folks working with this restaurant. For this reason I haven't mentioned the restaurant by name. If I didn't know them, the first thing I would have done after leaving would have been to tweet about the experience since I had earlier retweeted the promotion. Again, my point with this post isn't to whine about an average experience at a fast food chain; I hope these guys succeed. It is just a good example of why it is important to align your social media strategy with your brand experience.