A sponsored Twitter campaign from McDonald’s took a wrong turn last week when the #McDStories hashtag was seized upon by non-fans of the chain.

According to Business Insider, the promoted tweet: “When u make something w/ pride, people can taste it,” McD potato supplier #McDstories,” was pulled after less than two hours. In the meantime, the hashtag was used for a litany of complaints about McDonald’s food, service quality and business practices.

This is a good reminder for brands that social media should be a window into your brand’s soul, not a contrived marketing tool. Every post needs to be constructed with an awareness of the realities of your brand, which means you have to be true to who you are and prepared to take the good with the negative.

Any time you start a conversation in social media, there’s a chance it will veer into unexpected territory. When that happens, you have an opportunity to gain some learnings about how your brand is perceived. Then you can develop a strategy to address misconceptions and, ideally, work on fixing legitimate problems that have been brought to your attention.

Sometimes a potential crisis can be turned into a marketing opportunity—but only if you act quickly.

On Friday, July 1, 2011, just as the 4th of July weekend was just about to start, a massive drop in water pressure led to a two-day boil order for Johnson County, Kansas. This might have meant that restaurant customers would take their business across the state line to Kansas City, Missouri, but casual dining group Houlihan’s wanted to make sure that their Johnson County restaurants retained their customers despite the possible setback.

Before the end of the day, they had written and sent emails to loyal customers of their three Johnson County properties—Houlihan’s, Bristol Seafood Grill and J. Gilbert’s—assuring them that the food and drinks would be prepared safely and offering restaurant dining as an alternative to the hassle and risk of cooking at home under the circumstances.

Each email was written in keeping with its restaurant’s usual marketing tone. Houlihan’s email subject line assured customers, “The water may be sketchy, but we’re not.” The Bristol pointed out, “Who needs water when you can have wine?” and J. Gilbert’s suggested, “Grill-in with us – it’s cooler than boiling your water.”

All three emails talked about how the restaurants had stocked up on clean ice and bottled water, soda and iced tea. They also stated that no tap water would be used for food or drink preparation until the boil order was lifted. J. Gilbert’s and The Bristol used their last paragraphs to tout some of their menu items, but Houlihan’s just added some extra words of reassurance. There was no special offer in any of the emails, only confident assertions of food safety.

Houlihan’s wasn’t the only restaurant in the area to frame messaging around the boil order. Westport Flea Market Bar & Grill, which is on the Kansas City, Missouri side of the state line and therefore outside of the boil order area, posted this on Facebook the same afternoon:

The key to both restaurants’ examples is speed and nimbleness. It helps to have a marketing team with the authority to act quickly when a situation arises. It’s also important to look at the situation realistically and anticipate your customers’ fears and questions before they have a chance to express them.

When it comes to boosting sales, it’s important to concentrate on what customers want more than when you want to sell it to them.

As restaurant marketers, we tend to invent a lot of words that make total sense in our planning meetings, but are meaningless in the real world.  What if people talked in real life the way we talk in the boardroom?

“Spouse, let’s see if other members of our customer segment in this geo-targeted zip would like to join us in the late evening daypart at the QSR in our trade area for an LTO transaction.”

What’s funny about that sentence is that if you are a restaurant marketer reading this this blog, it probably made perfect sense.

One of my favorite invented words is “daypart” (as I type this, my spellcheck keeps telling me it’s not a word).  I love it because a killer daypart strategy can be the Holy Grail to sales and profit growth.

But, the key to a successful daypart strategy is not to think about it as “parts of the day.”  Rather, focus on satisfying needs (we have a term for this, too, by the way – it’s called “Need States”).  In other words, stop thinking about discounting your lunch and dinner items to get people to buy them during historically slow times of the day.  Instead, study what’s going on in your customers’ lives at a particular point in time and become part of the solution.

Example: In the late evening during the summer months, we know there are two important customer segments (young adults and families with kids) who want to get outside, relax and connect.  We know from looking at snacking/treating research that ice cream significantly over-indexes with these groups during this particular time of year at this particular time of day.

As a result of these insights, we worked with SONIC to create a nationally branded program called “Even Sweeter After Dark” to satisfy this need.  There is typically very little discounting during this program.  Instead, we drove sales by providing the right product/experience at the right time with the right message when the customers were in the right frame of mind.

If done right, you’ll get people talking like this, “Honey, let’s see if the Johnsons next door would like to join us and the kids down at Sonic after dinner for a shake.”

Photo credit: Linda – Lindspetrol