Using Social Media for New Product Launch

Getting America Buzzing About Chicken

WOMMA 11/14/08

Leaders have to be innovators

Innovative products and innovative ways to sell and market them

Heather McDonald’s Legacy

Legacy of innovation at breakfast

Egg McMuffin, McGriddles

Heather Breakfast

Chicken.

Heather Next Big Step…

Chicken for breakfast?

Heather Beyond Eggs

Hope that chicken for breakfast was unique enough to start conversation

But we couldn’t rely on that alone– Build on the inherent uniqueness of chicken for

breakfast – Leverage the universal appeal of the Chicken vs. Egg

debate

Heather Chicken with Buzz

Take a known entity and make it new

Creative extension of an age old conversation

Heather Setting Up the Debate

Program Overview

Standard product launch tactics

Extended Goals of – Driving traffic to restaurant through buzz-generating

viral outreach and ethnic-market activation

– Inciting debate about chicken for breakfast via an interactive, online consumer experience

– Bolstering McDonald’s leadership position in the breakfast category while communicating our legacy of innovation and quality

How We Did It

• National Sampling Day• WhatCameFirst.com• Exclusive CNBC Story/Viral Activation• National Media Relations• Dance Like a Chicken Day• Local Market PR Support• Internal Communications

WhatCameFirst.com– Customizable game to

make chicken and egg characters complete in a animated dance-off

– Ability to forward to and “challenge” friends

– Man-on-the-Street video interviews with people weighing in on the “chicken vs. egg” debate

– Bi-lingual

WhatCameFirst.com Results

– More than 45,000 visitors on sampling event day

– 150,000 visitors in first month

– More than 40,000 dance offs

– WhatCameFirst sent overwhelming traffic to McDonalds.com on May 15

Secured exclusive story on CNBC’s Squawk Box to launch the site and product on April 28

Exclusive Broadcast Placement

Viral Activation

WhatCameFirst.com launched with an e-mail to McDonald’s consumer database (1.4 million subscribers)

E-mail drove significant traffic to the site and teased May 15 sampling day

Blogger Outreach

National Media

Worked with U.S. Communications and the national market-specific agencies to secure over 82.5 million impressions in top-tier national media, including:

Media Driving Conversations

• High profile placements drove spikes in discussions and Web traffic:– Chicago Tribune: 129

comments– Consumerist.com: 166

comments

Results

• In the week leading up to the sampling event, pitching resulted in nearly 400 blog postings

• More than 1,100 blog postings overall

• More than 11,500 online discussions about Southern Style chicken in:– Blogs– Videos – Discussion forums– Twitter (77 postings)

• Sampling event drove 3x more conversation than Dunkin Donuts event

• Online and offline buzz led SSC to be the 13th most frequently searched term on Google on the sampling day

Community Outreach

• Hosted Breakfast Sampling Event in NYC with 19 media attending

• Leveraged Terrence J’s MySpace network and worked with him to post information about the Web site on his personal page

National Dance Like a Chicken Day celebrations outside morning TV shows

NYC Street TeamActivation

Local Market PR

Worked with local markets nationwide to promote the national sampling day and WhatCameFirst.com

Provided Arch Cards, branded sleeves and WhatCameFirst.com t-shirts to various local markets, as needed

NBA All-Star Dwight Howard recorded a video for StationM, inviting crew members to submit videos of themselves dancing like a chicken to win great prizes.

At Convention, Elliot Sadler and Kasey Kahne took a few minutes to debate, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” and encourage crew members to log online to WhatCameFirst.com.

Internal ActivationHeather

Final Results

• More than:– 45,000 completed Dance-Offs– 150,000 UNIQUE Web Site Visitors– 11,000 online conversations

• …and with a media total of

–162 million impressions

Heather

• What’s Next– Social Media is growing in importance– Moving from campaign-based to strategic,

on-going positioning– Chicken will continue to be important part

of menu– Quality will be important part of

communications

Heather

Thanks!