The trend for all things hyperlocal – broadly defined as content created for a well-defined, community scale area – seems only to be growing in strength. It’s a technique that allows media or bloggers to provide (and source) very targeted news or information, and social technologies are making it easier and quicker to do this.

Brands have been creating market-specific campaigns for years, but the popularity of personalisation is also affecting the way larger companies think about the promotion of their goods.

McDonald’s has been integrating its efforts of late, and following two successful attempts at localised online activity (with 280 variations and Smoothies Spin), has launched two new micro-campaigns in the French and American markets. The first aims to raise awareness, the second to highlight the fast food chain’s ‘natural’ qualities.

McDonald’s France is currently running an online competition in which participants have to find 12 hidden words around the web that symbolise the company’s various McFlurry recipes. They can be found on sponsored banners, as well as on Youtube and Facebook (where the brand is giving out clues as to where to find them, much like Cadbury’s Nibbles campaign). Entries are also gathered via a Facebook app, and the fastest participants with the correct answers will receive one year’s supply of ice cream

The second promotion, which has been launched for Washington State, is focused on the product’s origin. The micro-website on McDonald’s US corporate platform provides visitors with information on where the ingredients of their food were sourced from. According to the site, 95 percent of fries and ‘Filet-O-Fish’ burgers, as well as 85 percent of the apples served from McDonald’s restaurants within Washington State come from farms in Washington area. Pepsi recently announced a partnership with Stickybits to eventually make the same type of information available for its own products.

This is local activity on a huge scale (you can’t really get any bigger in terms of FMCG brands than McDonald’s), but marks a significant trend in terms of using market-specific social media presences and tailored campaigns to reach fans that are made easily accessible online.

In turn, there’s a lesson for PRs. Just because something works in the UK for instance, that doesn’t mean it’ll work in the US – and vice versa. This is common sense to most good PRs, but in order to keep abreast of the development of hyperlocal channels, success and failure as a result of local/online crossovers like these can provide useful lessons.