#PRmageddon — Post-Valentine's edition

Jezebel has a great little piece about how the big flower industry took a social media beating yesterday due to disappointing product, shabby service, and often complete failure to deliver.

Ouch! FTD may want to rethink that slogan, "say it your way". It looks like their customers already have.

As the article points out, " course, Valentine's Day floral screw-ups have probably been happening for years, but now thanks to the magic of social networking, we have an up close and personal view of the epic fails all of the major online florists seem to be experiencing at the moment."

What Jez fails to mention is the phenomenal "out" this provides to all the men with disappointed (intentionally) flowerless Valentine's dates. "I ordered it from FTD" could be the new "the cheque is in the mail".



No word on whether Teleflora caused Adriana Lima's date to sleep on the couch.

McDonald's serves up hashtags, gets burned. #McDStories

Big corporations and social media is a volatile mix. McDonald's learned this the hard way this month when they introduced a special hashtag (#McDStories) on Twitter in an attempt to generate some free customer-generated social PR to go with its new campaign.

The results, for anyone who spends time on Twitter, were predictable. It was a freaking dogpile.

And of course PETA got involved.

While there are ways to deal with this kind of backlash, McDonald's is just too big to give a community manager the power and training to fix it, and to hated to avoid messing it up anyway.

They should have stuck with hashbrowns.

F'd Ad Fridays: "At Last Singer Etta James Dies at 73"

Casey also sent me a link to this apparent (and very sad) headline fail:

If it's real, it has since been changed.

But this hasn't:

Rest in peace, Ms. James