McDonald’s to Charles Ramsey, Amanda Berry’s rescuer: ‘We’ll be in touch.’
Along with Amanda Berry, Charles Ramsey, and Ariel Castro, another name has become strangely linked to the harrowing kidnapping story in Cleveland this week: McDonald’s.
It started with Mr. Ramsey, the neighbor who helped Ms. Berry escape from the suburban home in Cleveland where she had been held captive with two other women, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight, for nearly a decade. Seeing Berry screaming and pushing through the door, Ramsey helped her kick the bottom of the door out, freeing Berry and her young daughter. Then he called 911:
“Hey check this out. I just came from McDonald’s, right? I’m on the porch eating my little food, right? This broad is trying to break out of the house next door to me…I just got back from McDonald’s,” he told the 911 dispatcher.
Later, after the two other women were freed by police and the local news had flooded the street, Ramsey told his story again to a local ABC affiliate:
"I heard screaming. I'm eating my McDonald’s. I come outside. I see this girl going nuts trying to get out of a house,” he said. "So I go on the porch, and she says ‘help me get out. I’ve been in here a long time.’”
The prominence of McDonald’s in Ramsey’s accounts didn’t go unnoticed by the fast food chain, which tweeted the following message from its official account yesterday:
“We salute the courage of Ohio kidnap victims & respect their privacy. Way to go Charles Ramsey- we'll be in touch."
McDonald’s spokeswoman Danya Proud has since told the Associated Press that the company is interested in speaking to Ramsey directly, though she declined to say what for.
The tweet, and McDonald’s subsequent involvement in the story, has raised a few eyebrows. “On first read, the tweet comes across as well-intentioned…and maybe we should leave the story about McDonald's there,” Seamus McKiernan wrote in the Huffington Post this morning. “But the more I reread the tweet, the more it bothers me. What's at issue is not the sentiment the tweet expresses, but the fact that McDonald's is the one expressing it…in the immediate wake of the disturbing story of kidnapping and abuse, why would McDonald's tweet about the story at all?”
The Twitterverse can be a tricky terrain for large companies, which use corporate feeds to promote their brands as a matter of routine. But when promotional concerns intersect with Twitter’s primary function – spreading news and commenting on current events – an errant tweet can result in a PR nightmare for companies that attempt to involve themselves.
In 2011, designer Kenneth Cole got into a world of trouble when he tweeted, during the most violent days of the revolution in Egypt, “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new collection is available online.” Even the most innocuous plugs can get a brand in trouble, if badly timed. Take Entenmann’s, the baked goods manufacturer that tweeted, “Who’s #notguilty about eating all the treats they want?!” – right after the Casey Anthony verdict was announced.
By comparison, the McDonald’s tweet is more measured, though its plans for Ramsey may be the true test. If they reach out to him for something productive, like charitable efforts for victims of domestic abuse, the company could become a model of how to correctly handle being inadvertently thrust into a major news story.
