My blog n'at

Lushie, Teaspoon and I pulled into the McDonalds drive-thru this morning and it wasn’t until I saw on their sign that there were new menu items. I’m not a big breakfast meal person so I usually just cruise by the fast food places while eating a breakfast bar. I’m always up for new items so I gave that a shot plus ordered food for the family. Normally I’d let them starve but I was feeling generous today and Lushie was buying.

Lets start with the food first. The Steak Egg McMuffin (not on website or I’d link) was a pleasant surprise. The butter was really pronounced on the steak but the meat was rather dry sitting on top of an overcooked egg and between chewy muffins, yeah not good. Overall as a meal it wasn’t bad but the dryness was a bit much.

OK, now with the fun part. As I pull up to the cashier she asks if I would like to fill out a survey and in return get $5. I figured taking an online survey would be fast and an easy $5 Lushie could use when she’s out with the kid. That’s when I got this…

That would be a NINE PAGE PAPER SURVEY! That’s right, its paper and there isn’t even an option to fill it out online! For a second I thought I was in a McDonalds Time Machine to 1995 and was waiting for my no. 2 pencil to arrive. If you click on the image you can see that I have 48 hours to fill it out and mail it (how on earth you’re going to do this tracking with snail mail is beyond me).

This is McDonalds, the overall king of fast food with innovative web marketing for its multi kajillion dollar company yet they’re making me fill out paper? Oh we’re not done yet. I start reading the questions and its like a tax form. There are codes look up for certain items, don’t fill out this if you answered A and B but do if you filled out C, your hair is brown and you like turtles.

I’ve taken the liberty of scanning this so you can see the insanity yourself. You can download the pdf here.

Now the kicker, at the very end they ask FOR YOUR EMAIL and it will take 4-5 weeks for delivery of the coupon. Needless to say I’m not wasting my time filling out 9 pages for $5. I’ve passed this along to colleagues who will most likely use it in their Marketing/PR classes for what not to do. The amount of money spent on this must be epic when you think about it. They printed up the survey, the envelope to give it to me and the envelope to send back PLUS paid for postage.

How do you handle this in 2010? Hand out business card size err cards at drive through with a surveymonkey link (I’ve done many forms online to know this would be no problem and really easy) and at the end of every day/week you run a report to get the info. Bam you’re done. You have instant feedback and can turn the reward around fast. Heck we’ve done shorter surveys with $50 itunes and $25 Starbucks gift certificates to hundreds of people.  $5 is just enough for a value meal, you could have given me a coupon to print out at the end and saved the postage.

If you want to find out more about how social media can save you from making costly (seriously, I’m just thinking about the money spent on printing and shipping and man hours to enter the data INTO A COMPUTER)  mistakes come to Podcamp Pittsburgh 5.  You can hear people like me talk and educate for FREE.

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