McDonald's has an appetite for social media

McDonald’s Courts Mom Bloggers When Changing the Menu
When McDonald's announced plans Tuesday to overhaul the Happy Meal — downsizing French fries and adding apples to to every kids' meal — the company's top brass used every communication trick they know to get the message out: Twitter, Facebook, and more. And they didn't just invite journalists to their webcast announcing the overhaul; they also invited select bloggers — namely, mom bloggers. "Mom bloggers are very networked and very linked-in," Rick Wion, director of social media for McDonald's, told me. "They spread information very, very quickly." Next week, at the BlogHer conference — a huge gathering of women bloggers — McDonald's will be there. Last year, McDonald's used the venue to help with the national launch of its new oatmeal...
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Casey Anthony's legal team analyzing social media content

Social Media’s Effect on the Casey Anthony Trial
The obsession over Casey Anthony blew up on the internet. Thousands of tweets, Facebook posts and blogs sounded off on everything from Casey's clothes and expressions to the attorneys, the witnesses and their testimony. "Your going to get a huge sample of email, internet activity, blogging, twixting, tweeting, whatever you want to call it. Everybody's going to start chiming in. So what you do is you study all that," says Tampa Defense Attorney Joe Episcopo. And that's exactly what Casey's legal team did. Social media consultants analyzed more than 40,000 online opinions and used them to help the defense craft their strategy...
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Uncontrollable crisis for the Murdochs

Phone Hacking Scandal is an Utter PR Disaster for the Murdochs
For those of us used to spending our journalistic time pondering the chilling strategic brilliance of News International, the past 10 days have been profoundly confusing. We have watched the leadership of the company ricochet from one crisis to the next, shutting a paper here, sacking a chief executive there, moving in and out of Parliamentary select committee range as though it were a hastily convened hokey cokey...
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The Murdochs PR falls short

PR Verdict on Rupert Murdoch: Small, Un-Frightening, Unimpressive
This week's performance by Rupert and James Murdoch at a British parliamentary hearing raises some questions that News Corp. will struggle to answer, regardless of the outcome of the phone-hacking scandal. I find it difficult not to believe that in the days leading up to the inquiry that Murdoch senior and junior will have been briefed by some smart PR muscle, looking to convey the best appearance, while managing the rhetoric to create the best possible image for crisis management, watered down into a fairly obvious mix of sincerity and contrition...
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Smart Quote

"Social media is the fastest spreading fire that the world has ever known."

-- unknown