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.