Reflecting how serious the restaurant industry has become about the power of sites like Facebook and Twitter, McDonald's and Starbucks both made announcements about plans to ramp up their social media presences.
McDonald’s, said Tuesday it has hired Rick Wion as director of social media, a position that surely could not have existed even 10 years ago. Wion joined McDonald’s from GolinHarris Communications, where he was vice president of social media and implemented digital-communications strategies for McDonald’s as well as Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, BP and other companies.
According to an internal memorandum from Bill Whitman, McDonald’s vice president of communications, Wion will “lead, develop and counsel internal and external partners on strategies and tactics that guide McDonald’s U.S. program activation in social media.”
Those initiatives will support the company’s marketing campaigns, long-term branding, crisis and customer service management, and employee engagement activities, Whitman wrote.
“Additionally,” Whitman wrote, “Rick will be responsible for aligning McDonald’s U.S. social-media strategies and tactics with U.S. and global disciplines, serving as McDonald’s U.S. social-media subject matter expert, including the identification and application of new trends and technologies to our ongoing efforts as well as the establishment of a consistent set of metrics to measure our progress and overall brand ROI.”
Social-media metrics and return on investment also have Starbucks in the news, as the Seattle-based chain is among the first companies to participate in Promoted Tweets, the long-awaited revenue source for Twitter. The microblogging site unveiled Tuesday its plan to monetize its popularity and growth, by selling companies the right to link their pages and profiles to keyword search results.
As one of the first brands to buy into Promoted Tweets, Starbucks can ensure that its tweets are seen in real time atop the Twitter feeds of likely-interested users searching for coffee or talking about going to Starbucks. So whenever a Twitter user searches for a keyword that Starbucks has agreed to buy, such as “coffee,” a Starbucks post appears at the top of search results, even if that message was written long before others.
“When people are searching on Starbucks, what we really want to show them is that something is happening at Starbucks right now,” Chris Bruzzo, the chain’s vice president of brand, content and online, told The New York Times. “Promoted Tweets will give us a chance to do that.”
Promoted Tweets are labeled as company-sponsored advertising in small type and are identified further by turning yellow when a user rolls a cursor over them.
Even for restaurants not looking to buy advertising on Twitter or other social-media platforms, devoting some staff to managing a company’s online presence has become standard.
Last April, Pizza Hut made news by taking on a “Twintern,” or Twittering intern, after a highly publicized national search. The chain, a division of Yum! Brands Inc., hired that Twintern, Alexa Robinson, for a full-time position last fall.
More often, management of social-media content falls on marketing department staffers with other full-time responsibilities or chefs and owners who take time away from the kitchen or dining-room floor to fire off updates on a mobile phone.
Mike Friedman, director of interactive services for Darden Restaurants, told the Miami Herald that the company relies on a variety of its employees to manage its social media efforts. Whoever the person behind the profile may be, however, he or she must be passionate about the brand and about reaching out to guests through social media, he said.
“Our consistency is only letting people who understand the brand speak on behalf of [it],” he told the paper. “In some cases that’s our marketing team, that’s our PR team, that’s our restaurant managers, that’s our chefs.”
Contact Mark Brandau at [email protected].