You Don't Get to Control Your Brand Image

In chapter 5 of Groundswell, the authors make the astute observation that "your brand is what your customers say it is." The Ricardo Guimaraes quote the authors pull is perhaps one the best, most helpful and most existential passages in the entire book:

The value of a brand belongs to the market, and not to the company...it lives outside the company, not in the company...The brand is an open structure--(and management doesn't) know how to manage an open structure.

An recent, obvious example of a corporate structure royally underestimating their ability to control a social dialog was McDonalds "#McDStories" disaster. For those who haven't heard about this, click for some context or see below how some interpreted McDonald's plea for stories:

Let's get this out of the way--McDonalds really fouled this up. But it's a mistake to stop there. I think their PR mishap illustrates a few important things:

1. Just how cutoff multinational corporations can be from their popular, perceived (vs. internally espoused) brand image.
2. Just how on the money Ricardo was.
3. How, since Ricardo was on the money, these same corporations can't get away with the same old one-way PR tactics (talking at) in a two-way medium (talking with).

I have to say, in the case of McDonald's, I have no interest in dissecting how they could have avoided this. I welcome terrible, rotten corporations getting some modicum of a comeuppance. What's interesting to me is that they actually went ahead and tried to engage in the Twitterverse in conversation with, I can only assume, a genuine belief that it would make them look good.

But they were too used to how things worked in the old days. They thought only the people that've been receptive to the traditional "talking at" tactic for the past 40+ years would engage them and that the haters/naysayers would simply sit this one out. But they forgot one very important  thing about of the Internet:

 It's home to a lot of trolls.

Dishonest corporations like McDonald's don't have the mettle to survive a truly social media platform. Any time they try something like "#McDStories" they're going to fail until their tone changes. The Twitterverse has to feel that McDonald's is willing to cede they have an overall negative public perception and show that they are actually interested in inviting a meaningful dialog to address concerns like animal treatment, food quality, contributions to an obese society, and so on.

If McDonald's doesn't realize that they don't get to control their brand image soon, it'll be time to put down the hashtags and stick to the hash browns.