Viability of Social Media use in the Organisation: A Memo by McDonald's Social Media Manager

31 August 2018

Memo
To: Management of the McDonald’s Corporation
From: Rick Wion
(The Social Media Manager)
Date: 31 August 2018
Regarding: Viability of Social Media use in the Organisation
With the increasing advancements of the internet technology and the digitalised
communication, social media has become a useful tool for the businesses to engage their
audiences and boost the marketing returns. There is a wide range of the social networking
sites and the applications that can be used by the entities for grabbing the attention of the
customers, creating sound marketing campaigns, crisis communication during crucial
situations and for obtaining the valuable feedback from the customers. The memo is aimed at
evaluating the fail of the McDonald's twitter campaign in the year 2012. The memo begins
with the viability of the use of social media and further examines the failure and better means
of social media campaigning.
Some of the major advantages that describe the empirical role of the social media in the
modern business organisations of the 21st century are listed below.
Cost effective: The use of social media for marketing is much cheaper as compared to the
traditional advertising and promotional methods. According to the report by the Data and
Marketing Association (DMA), approximately 77 % of the marketers are engaged in the
usage of at least one of the social network, for the promotion of their brand (Allen, 2017). In
addition to it, entities are earning the significant return on the social media investment.

Various Techniques: Some of the popular social media platforms are Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, Snapchat and more. The few techniques that are being incorporated in the social
media plan of the organisation are in-app advertising, search engine marketing, conducting
giveaways, competitions, use of business analytics for market researches and more. Thus, the
various platforms and the techniques can be chosen, depending upon the budget and the
overall corporate strategy.
Wide Coverage, networking and feedback opportunity: The social media campaigns hold
the potential to target the customers across the globe at once. In addition to this, social media
allows the exchange of the ideas and earn feedbacks in real time from the customers. Thus,
the allowance of the real-time two-way communication is another striking feature of the
social media usage for marketing (Paniagua and Sapena, 2014).
Research and Brand Development: The social media tool such as Google analytics assist
the entities in the procurement of the vital data on lines of the customer preferences and the
market trends.
Recruitment: Apart from aid to the marketing activities, the social media provides a great
platform to the entities to recruit the best of the minds across the world. The websites like
LinkedIn are a perfect platform to aid hiring of the employees.
However, some of the disadvantages that pertain to the use of the social media are as follows.
Greater management and security responsibilities: With the inclusion of the information
technology and other digital innovations, comes the responsibility of effective management
and the security of the systems, data and information (Siddiqui and Singh, 2016).
Time Intensive: The social media strategies require a significant time investment and the
same would not yield enormous returns on an instant basis, because of the competition
involved. Hence, the time consideration is a crucial aspect of the use of social media.