As the Olympics begins, McDonalds languishes at the bottom of the official sponsor’s league table in terms of Twitter buzz, according to new data.
The fast food brand ranked 25th, while Coca-Cola, P&G and Omega topped the BrandWatch table created by Mediacom.
The tracker measures factors including volume of tweets, sentiment, potential reach of the tweeter and if tweets get responses.
McDonald’s has been languishing at the foot of the table for the last three weeks – with daily scores of between minus 70,000 to 100,000.
Coke shot to the top due to positive comments being tweeted about boyband The Wanted making surprise visits to some torchbearers as part of the soft drink giant’s support of the Olympic torch relay.
McDonalds recent dip in Twitter popularity can be partly attributed to a controversial endorsement from London Mayor Boris Johnson.
The mayor of London told reporters on Thursday that criticism of McDonald’s was “all just bourgeois snobbery”.
“It’s classic liberal hysteria about very nutritious, delicious, food – extremely good for you I’m told – not that I eat a lot of it myself,” he said. “Apparently this stuff is absolutely bursting with nutrients.”
The comment has sparks a raft of angry Tweets criticising both Johnson and McDonalds over selling the brand as a ‘health food’.
Earlier this week health campaigners published a report, called Obesity Games, which heavily criticised the International Olympic Committee for allowing junk food brands to be sponsors.
To counter negative sentiments, McDonald’s has mounted a public outreach campaign in London, announcing the launch of a new QR code system that will allow consumers to look up the nutritional info of foods with the scan their smartphones.
Amidst the chorus of critics who have opened fire at fast food and junk food brands sponsoring the Olympic Games, the company attempted to soften its image at a press conference where it announced new nutritional initiatives.
Among the biggest development is a QR code that will appear on food packaging and provide nutritional information to consumers. The system will debut at the McDonald’s Olympic venue restaurants — there are four in total — before rolling out to the majority of restaurants around the world by the end of 2013.
For the first time at the Olympic Games, children’s Happy Meals will also include a fruit, vegetable or low-fat dairy option.
Brandwatch Methodology
The Olympic Sponsors Twitter Tracker is powered by Brandwatch technology. The tracker consolidates all social media mentions of the 25 Olympic sponsors that take place on Twitter, and for the purposes of this analysis focuses on those from the UK. The Olympics tracker calculates a performance score for each brand, forming a ranking to indicate which brand is getting the best social media response to their Olympics sponsorship. The performance score for each brand used in the ranking is created by a MediaCom influence methodology: Performance score = POSITIVITY of comments x ENGAGEMENT by the people commenting x Potential REACH of those comments
View the BrandWatch graph here
