#McFail? McDonald's Twitter campaign gets hijacked

— -- Give consumers a microphone, and they'll have something to say — it just might not be what you want to hear. That's a lesson McDonald's learned once again, the hard way.

Earlier this month, the fast-food chain was forced to pull down a social media campaign it had launched on Twitter using the sponsored hashtag #McDStories.

Hashtags are clickable links Twitter users can place on their posts to aggregate tweets on the same subject.

McDonald's quickly pulled down the promoted hashtag, but it lives on. There's also a new one that's grown popular — #McFail — which is being used by those discussing the fiasco.

Such is the way of social media marketing: It can backfire quickly and spectacularly.

As the Financial Times points out, McDonald's is only the latest victim. There have been similar backlashes against social media campaigns from brands such as fast-food chain Wendy's and Australian airline Qantas.

McDonald's social media director, Rick Wion, told PaidContent.org: "Within an hour, we saw that it wasn't going as planned. It was negative enough that we set about a change of course."

Wion said McDonald's carefully selects the words and phrases it uses in promoted tweets because it is inevitable both "fans and detractors will chime in."

In Wion's Twitter feed, @rdublife, he is still discussing the incident and he shared a statistic: On the day of the promotion, there were more than 72,000 mentions of McDonald's and only 2% were negative.

A certain amount of negative feedback must be expected in every social media campaign, especially when it involves companies that have a history of being a lightning rod.

Copyright CNBC.com.