It just goes to show that not all publicity is good publicity as McDonald's found out recently.

A Twitter campaign was fired up that was supposed to be an opportunity for customers to share their amazing McDonald's stories with the rest of the Twitterati, but it backfired when the stories that were posted had a less than positive feel about them.

Among the tweets, posted to #McDStories there were submissions such as "I haven't been to McDonald's in years, because I'd rather eat my own diarrhoea," and "One time I walked into McDonald's and I could smell Type 2 diabetes floating in the air and I threw up,"

Rick Wion, McDonalds social media director said in an interview with PaidContent, "Within an hour, we saw that it wasn't going as planned," he added, "It was negative enough that we set about a change of course."

So, it's a lesson to be learned that it's not always a pot of gold at the end of the social media rainbow. If you open up the flood gates of customer opinion, you had better be sure that you don't drown...