After removing these posts, topic modeling yielded vastly more meaningful themes. Near shops, there is a McDonalds within a block”. Another cluster consisted of posts that did mention McDonald’s, but using it as a geographical landmark, such as “Renting a two-bedroom apartment. One such cluster was all of the posts in Ukrainian, which were irrelevant to our analysis as we were only interested in posts from Russia. Our initial round of topic modeling did not give a meaningful cluster of topics concerning people’s opinions on McDonald’s, but it did give a few well-defined clusters consisting entirely of irrelevant posts. It is an especially useful tool when doing exploratory analysis because it goes through every nook and cranny of your data and can reveal interesting and unexpected themes within the data. Topic modeling is a tool that automatically and quickly clusters documents into common themes based on patterns of words that tend to appear together. We used topic modeling to find the most common themes in the data. In addition, no national holidays or special events concerning McDonald’s occurred during this week. We chose VK as our data source due to it being, by far, the top Russian social media outlet, with over 100 million users. The search yielded a total of 12,000 posts. In search of the Russian voiceįor our analysis, we collected real-time posts about McDonald’s from Vkontakte (VK), the dominant social media platform in Russia which is similar to Facebook, for the week of June 19th to 26th, 2015. Our analysis of Russian social media showed that many cultural concerns dominated public conversations and played an important role in the overwhelmingly negative sentiment that Russians expressed towards the franchise. While several media sources ( The Washington Post, Bloomberg Business, The Wall Street Journal) have speculated that the closing of McDonald’s’ locations is a part of the Kremlin’s retribution for the United States’ support of economic sanctions levied against Russia, relatively little attention has been paid to the voice of the customer in Russia.
By August 2014, about half of the 440 McDonald’s’ stores in Russia were under government investigation. However, during the last two years, its public reputation has declined amidst government investigations and allegations of hygiene regulations. In the quarter century since its opening, McDonald’s forged a predominantly positive and youthful image among Russians. The Pushkin Square store beat the record number of inaugural sales with 30,000 customers, and to this day, it serves 20,000 customers daily. This was the largest McDonald’s store in the world at the time, with 28 cash registers and a capacity of 700 customers. On August 31, 1990, the McDonald’s corporation opened its very first store in Russia on Moscow’s Pushkin Square. During my internship at Idibon, I partnered with a fellow intern, Olga,to find out what Russian people are saying about the closures of McDonald’s in Russia. The results somewhat differed from what the western media was covering.
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