It was March 2006 when Fernando Sosa and Thomas Middleditch rapped a video in the streets of Chicago about their love of McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets. Maybe you know this story.
The video was filmed by Matt Malinsky, with a McDonald’s franchise in the background. The company had nothing to do with the citizen-generated video; their only involvement was they made the food product which the two 20-something fans liked so much they created a rap.
The video saw tens of thousands of views on YouTube in the first year. Arnold Worldwide, an advertising agency based in Boston, was tipped about the video and, after consulting with the burger-and-fries empire, it was decided to adapt Sosa’s and Middleditch’s rap into a TV commercial. The media gulped it down, TV viewers raced to the stores to buy McNuggets, and one of social media’s earliest case studies was born.
Here’s the original video with over 2 million views today:
Here’s a version of the TV adaptation, with over 579,000 views since July 2007:
Neil Golden, the chief marketing officer for McDonald’s in the United States, shared last fall how the company uses the internet to engage with its customers.
You can read blogs by David Meerman Scott or Mitch Joel until you’re green in the face, but you can’t get simpler than this 31-second video. Companies will fail online if they do not go where their customers go. Companies will fail online if they do not engage with their customers, from customer service to brand management.
Unless your customers are not online to begin with — which you’ll never know if you don’t look for them or ask them directly — there’s no way around this tenet of online marketing.
Companies will also fail if they don’t reward their biggest fans.
What Sosa, Middleditch, and Malinsky are to McDonald’s, Dusty Sorg and Michael Jedrzejewski are to Coca-Cola. Maybe you also know this story.
When Dusty wanted to click a button and be a “fan” of Coke on Facebook, he ran into a brick wall. There was no page. So, the out-of-work actor and his writer friend co-created a page, filled it with useful content, and — to the astonishment of both Facebook and Coca-Cola management when they learned of the page — observed 3 million people voluntarily opting to be fans in 7 months. The duo were not alone in wanting to fan the company, hindsight showed.
Coke executives flew the guys to their Atlanta headquarters, treated them to a company tour, and met with them… leading to the pair continuing to administer the Facebook page (aided by a Coke representative), and undoubtedly to a monetary tune. You can befriend Coca-Cola on Facebook here.
If you were in the beverage manufacturer’s shoes and saw what they saw, how would you react to an unofficial Facebook page with fan statistics you would want for yourself? What would you do? If you were Arnold or McDonald’s, would you have capitalized on the citizen-created video? Do you even look if anyone’s created a video about you?
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{ 14 comments }
Twitter: DannyBrown
January 29, 2010 at 7:19 AM
Maybe I’m just cynical in my old age, but I can’t help but think Neil Golden had been fed a bunch of social media buzzwords and key phrases to say. It just seems the pat response of people when asked about online strategies and where they fit in with social media.
Time for some new sound bites.
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Most Fortune 500 CMOs would recite buzzwords for the same reason, no?
Twitter: DannyBrown
January 29, 2010 at 2:08 PM
Which is why the ones that don’t stand out more and make me listen.
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Who are some example CMOs that make you listen?
Twitter: DannyBrown
January 31, 2010 at 9:22 PM
Barry Judge of Best Buy; Ted Rubin of e.l.f Cosmetics; and Eric Fletcher of McGlinchey Stafford PLLC are three that spring to mind. Not just social, but how they integrate it overall.
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Twitter: DannyBrown
January 29, 2010 at 7:44 AM
On a separate note, it goes to show that very often, the simplest ideas can outshine the most thought-through professional creative briefs. Sometimes over-analyzing how to do something just leads to not actually doing anything.
Cheers for the shares, Ari.
.-= New from Danny Brown: Audi and the Super Bowl Social Media Shit Storm =-.
I always appreciate that users work the way it possible for me because they did something which I unable to realize and most importantly they did it without expecting any return.
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Huh?
If anybody do the similar thing for my site
I believe Coca-Cola made the right decision to bring the folks in who created the FB page for them. I think it was a clever use of their time instead of starting fresh. The McDonald’s video is fabulous. If I saw a video of something as great as this about my brand, I would definitely partner with the talent. Again, why reinvent the wheel if it’s working or has potential. Love it. Thanks for sharing this with us.
Agreed on not inventing the wheel, but important not to steal the wheel either without improving upon it.
So perhaps the next trend for promotion should be to hire people to rap about us.
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small people/company will surely learn from this giants.
are these your personal shots Ari?
thanks for sharing it. I may not learned if you did not post it here.
Scott recently wrote Inside Out – Educational Resources Website Design
Wow. I hope Coke will also treated me to a company tour and my mom too because she’s a Coke fan
And of course I hope Mcdonald will give me a 1 year Mcdonald food sponsor 
kirsty recently wrote Split Tests on Shopping Carts and Content Management Systems
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