McDonald’s signs up for Facebook’s geo-targeting service

Global fast food giant McDonald’s has reportedly signed up to leverage Facebook’s imminent location-based status updates, which will allow brands to target consumers with geographically relevant marketing. The new location feature could launch as soon as this month in the US.

George Nimeh, Managing Director of agency Iris Digital told Brand Republic this week that the service was a natural fit for Facebook and a big draw for brands – as long as they keep the service fun as well as functional.

Karsten Weide, Research Vice President for digital media and entertainment at consultancy IDC agrees, adding: “Being associated with brands can be cool… Whether a lot of people think it is cool to be associated with McDonald’s is a different question.”

Whatever the result, the fast food’s giant foray into location-based advertising will make a great case study for our tolerance of this type of advertising.

It also heralds a greater focus on social media or online PR for the brand. Last month McDonald’s named its first social-media chief, Rick Wion, who hails from GolinHarris, Chicago. Wion has been tasked with using social media to build the business, manage customer problems, and beef up outreach to target groups such as “mommy bloggers” in the US. He’s to work with McDonald’s media relations team and will be 100% dedicated to social media strategy for the brand.

Wion was recently involved in establishing the brand’s Twitter handle @mcdonalds and establishing the process for responding to consumer complaints. He has also advised regional teams with regards to how to set up their own feeds, in the event, for example that there’s a promotion in Cincinnati that isn’t going on in Philadelphia.

One of his first major projects will be stepped up outreach to the “mommy bloggers” which the chain has been courting for several years. The team act as roving correspondents, tasked with checking up on the quality of the food served at franchises around the US, and blogging about it. There is a team covering the Washington D.C. and Baltimore areas, and in Canada a team of “McMoms” at Urbanmom scrutinize food quality, dispensing gold stars.

McDonald’s isn’t the only restaurant chain to increase its focus on social media. Starbucks has also been in the news as it is among the first companies to participate in Promoted Tweets, the long-awaited revenue source for Twitter.

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 labelled as company-sponsored advertising in small type and are identified further by turning yellow when a user rolls a cursor over them.