Was the McDonald’s Twitter campaign really a disaster?

Written on January 27, 2012 – 12:40 pm by Ding

Disclaimer:  I am now an intern at M&M Global, a media and marketing trade journal, but this piece does NOT represent the views of the magazine.  Also, see that word intern:  That means I’m a rung on the ladder below junior.  Views to be taken with a pinch of salt.

A Twitter campaign run by McDonald’s got a little out of hand a few days ago.  The fast food chain promoted two tweets with two hashtags encouraging tweeters to 1) learn about the McDonald’s supply chain with #meetthefarmers and 2) share their stories about their McDonald’s experiences with #McDStories.

The meet the farmers hashtag was doomed to mediocrity from conception.  It’s a nice idea and apparently did quite well, but isn’t going to engage mass audiences.  Besides, as soon as you give most people the word ‘farmer’, they instantly translate it into a West Country accent.  When I used to tell people I went to Farmor’s School, you could see them doing it in their heads.

The second hashtag however was just plain doomed from conception.  If you’ve spent any amount of time in the real world, or indeed on Twitter, you don’t need any marketing training or experience to know where the #McDStories was going to go.  Instead of the warm and fuzzy “I’m Lovin’ It” tweets they were apparently expecting, the hashtag very quickly filled up with horror stories and general bile directed towards the golden arches.  The promoted tweet was pulled after a couple of hours when they saw how their social marketing audience had turned.

This incident was reported just about everywhere and heralded as one of the first social media marketing gaffs of the year.  I can’t help feeling however that there’s something more to it.

I think McDonald’s got a lot of mileage out of that one promoted tweet.

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New Years Resolution: Regarding Cynicism

Written on January 19, 2012 – 11:56 am by Ding

I dislike resolutions.  I dislike what they do to my brain the rest of the year.  If there is something worth making a resolution about then you probably shouldn’t have to wait until you start writing on a new calendar and you should instead just start doing it and the idea of New Years Resolutions makes me not want to start doing something until I get to a neat round number of a date.

It’s probably the same reason I strongly dislike Valentine’s day.  Someone can be a filthy scum-weasel to their significant other all year round and get a free pass if they take them to Paris on Februrary 14th.  Similar with “Christmas spirit” (as in good cheer, not drinking before noon), you should be a good and cheerful person all year round, not just when the world tells you to buy a few cards and presents.

With that being said, with 2012 rolling around, it got me thinking about what I would like to change about myself.  I considered that maybe doing a bit of exercise might be a good idea, drinking less would also be good and possibly being a little more generally organised in terms of diet and lifestyle, but to be honest I’m in a good place with all of that.  The thing that I really want to change is my attitude towards things.  It’s not that I have a particularly bad attitude towards life in general and I consider myself optimistic and irritatingly chirpy at times, but when it comes to media and entertainment, I have been passively brainwashed to hate and despise everything without giving it a fair chance.

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This Week’s Tortoises – 8-14 August 2011

Written on August 14, 2011 – 10:00 am by Ding

This picture sums up my personal highlight of this week.

This week we have seen rioting in London, legal wrangling in the gaming world and I managed to find a needle in a haystack.  This weeks tortoises have been the following:

A little commentary on Bethesda’s trademark action in Trademark Trolls:  Scrolls and Bethesda v Mojang.  (I realise that looks like [Scrolls and Bethesda] v [Mojang] now but is actually meant [Scrolls] and [Bethesda v Mojang].  Some inadvertent eats shoots and leaves stuff there.)

My most popular post to date with The Return of the Cat, which makes sense because it’s about a cat and this is the internet.  I am seriously considering becoming a cat blogger (as in somebody who blogs about cats, not a cat who blogs).

Concern over the way that the media is trying to classify Technology as a Scapegoat with their remarks about how it was largely orchestrated through Twitter.

The aggravating nature of requiring Constant Internet Connections for Gaming and just how far the internet has come for this to be viable.

Another Tortoise Butler film with Portal 2 Music Video – Exile Vilify By The National in which highly talented people achieve deserted London shots by getting up at stupid ‘o clock, film high quality video clips in a short space of time, and I make posters and buildings that aren’t there in Photoshop.

A growing trend in iOS games for Delayed Gameplay Games which tell you when you can play and not the other way around (now with a wonderful comment from someone who I can tell has been deeply wounded by this sort of game).

This week’s iPad/iPhone Game:  Dream Track Nation, a simple time trial racer with buckets of charm.

We finish the week on two posts about how to make comics, with How to Make Comics Part 1 making soft reassuring noises that you don’t need a full blown graphic design studio and How to Make Comics Part 2 blowing simplicity out of the water by talking about my method of colouring things in using Photoshop.

 

That’s all for this week.   I hope you’ve had as productive and satisfying week as I have and have thoroughly enjoyed the weekend as much as I’m hoping to, as I am writing this on Saturday morning (which means I’m communicating with the future I suppose).  Also just want to give a small self indulgent plug, but I have now passed all of my NCTJ exams and am officially fully qualified as a journalist, so if you want to employ me for a commission or an actual job, drop me a line at davidDOTofDOThingATgmailDOTcom and we can talk!

-Ding

 

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Technology as a Scapegoat

Written on August 9, 2011 – 9:43 am by Ding

Riot or free-for-all shopping spree? Hard to tell.

Over the weekend and early this week, violent riots have sprung up over London supporting the cause of “we want a new pair of trainers and to smash windows and to burn houses”.

As people’s property and businesses burn and we see images of rioters strutting around sporadically throwing things at the police like confused adolescent school children having a sulk, the media keeps bringing up a piece of information that I feel is always on the brink of turning into something ugly.  They keep mentioning that these riots have been organised by using Blackberries and Twitter or Facebook.

It hasn’t happened yet, but I can’t help feeling that they’re trying to turn technology into a scapegoat for these riots.

What has actually caused this uprising is hard to tell.  Suggestions that it was in protest of the shooting of Mark Duggan as part of Operation Trident, an initiative targeting ‘black-on-black’ gun crime, is an absurd notion as that was protested peacefully in Tottenham before the violence erupted.  When you see a furniture store in flames in Croydon, it’s hard to reconcile that with a shooting in Tottenham.

There doesn’t even seem to be any political motivation.  This isn’t some wider protest about the state of the country.  There’s no one particular event that could have got people this riled up and although the news has been full of woe and downturn of late, its nothing that would get people fired up to smash and grab.

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This Week’s Tortoises – 1-7 August 2011

Written on August 7, 2011 – 10:00 am by Ding

This week has seen a flurry of activity as I have rediscovered the joys of blogging.  In order of earlier in the week to later in the week, we have had:

 

 

The Chaotic Tortoise What David Hing Has Been Doing ™ post in The Writer’s Quest Continues

 

 

 

 

 

A Tortoise Butler film called Listening Post

 

 

 

 

 

Game review of iPhone/iPad game Quiz Climber

 

 

 

 

In light of some commentary from Ars Technica, thoughts on game journalism and marketing in Game Journalists and the Marketing Machine

 

 

 

 

 

 

Video on demand and online broadcasting discussed as technology we take for granted in If you could have your own TV show…

 

 

 

 

Sharing mistakes and experiences in Game Design Friday:  Placeholder Graphics

 

 

 

 

 

 

Killer Dice review of farming-based board game Agricola

 

 

 

-Ding

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9 Second Lego Castle

Written on February 24, 2011 – 9:27 pm by Ding

Well, I like stop motion and I like lego…

I remember when I was young Lego used to make amazing adverts with everything building up in stop motion and flying around all over the place.  Maybe if I’m feeling ambitious I might try something similar, but for the time being I’m just proud I got this to work.  I want to try and make a little bit of traditional style animation using the same software so this has turned into a wonderful little test.

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Collecting Compulsion

Written on February 24, 2011 – 7:42 pm by Ding

I’m not interested in frogs.

Frog. Not interested.

That is, I’m not interested in frogs until you give me a green one and a brown one and tell me there are more to collect.

This compulsion to collect things is something that a lot of ordinary geeks have and something that affects almost all of us at some point in our lives.  If you have two of something and there’s a third that’s in the same set, it’s almost impossible not to want it because you feel like the items “belong” together, and that getting two and not the other is somehow like splitting up a family.

In terms of gaming, the desire to get 100% completion of a game can sometimes overwhelm an individual, but this is a slightly different issue:  This is more to complete a collection.  To get a full set.   The confusing question that you will ask yourself shortly after completing a collection is obvious, but only obvious once that condition is triggered:  What happens next?

The answer is most of the time simple and a little distressing:  Nothing.

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The Raeburn Shield

Written on February 1, 2011 – 6:22 pm by Ding

Despite being an ordinary geek, I’m not normally a sports fan.  That may sound a little abhorrent as the words “geek” and “sports” don’t normally mix unless there is the letter “e” thrown in there somewhere but really, sports fanatics are ordinary geeks.  They pore over statistics and have encyclopaedic knowledge over things that really don’t matter.  Not only this, but a lot of them will play something like fantasy football which is quite frankly a couple of twenty sided dice away from Dungeons and Dragons.  It even has the word “fantasy” in the title.  If die hard sports fans aren’t geeks, then they are exceptionally close cousins.

A friend of mine at work was telling me about the Raeburn Shield and I did find this to be quite an interesting idea and thought I would share.

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Intelligent Tinned Ham

Written on January 28, 2011 – 9:24 am by Ding

I have this horrible feeling that spam might be driving me to a point of paranoia where I may have unapproved a couple of legitimate comments, as some spam is getting clever and just subtle enough for me to think “maybe they did just like my article and want to say so?” despite their login name being something like FreeRegistryCleaner.  Then of course I tie myself in knots thinking that maybe they’d called themselves that to be ironic or that maybe they had the world most boring yet intriguing nickname.

If I have unapproved a comment of yours and you are a real person and not a robot (not that I’m robot-ist) then drop me a line and I’ll reinstate it.

Additional Notes:

The internet can become a paranoid place.  I started looking around on a Minecraft server last night and made the mistake of asking for building rights, which started a long “interview process” where the admin in question was definitely suspicious of me and convinced I was going to try and destroy their carefully crafted world.  I completely understand why this is the case but it is sad all the same.  Maybe there’s a broader comment about the human condition and the few making life hell for the many in there.

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Distractions

Written on November 21, 2010 – 6:14 pm by Ding

This past week I have rediscovered, if indeed I ever truly forgot, just how easily I am distracted by the smallest of things.

Some careless comment last week has led to me reliving some childhood memories of Sonic the Hedgehog. It’s all much much shorter than I remember and much simpler too, although this could be a decade old muscle memory kicking in as I pick up the old clunky Megadrive controller.

I’ve also discovered a small game that I’ve read about a couple of times called “Game Dev Story”, a simple sim game where you run your own game studio by hiring, firing and developing new games to earn money. It’s so remarkably insultingly easy, being essentially a spreadsheet with pictures, yet it is also so unbelievably compelling that I have been compulsively “developing games” all day and now have my own console, the “Uberdrive” and a good four sequel ridden franchises.

It’s actually been an interesting exercise in understanding sequels and why they are so prevalent: They sell and aren’t in any way shape or form a risk. It is however rather sad that even in a simple simulation game, I fall into the trap that many real life studios fall into anyway of just reiterating their same titles again and again. Regardless, if you have some kind of iDevice, I would take a look, just to see what ti’s about.

These distractions that have been attacking and successfully derailing me can only mean one thing: I have a couple of projects that I want to do, which of course shoots my susceptibility to such distractions sky high. I shall post more about these when I have done a bit more, but to cut a boring story short, I’m making a new game and am inordinately proud of where it is so far.

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