How To Pay Your Customers to Complain About Your Service

The other headline I considered for this blog post was “Beware the power of the promoted Tweet”.

Of course no business knowingly sets out to pay to have their customers to complain about them. However, that’s exactly what Rogers did today with their promoted tweet for “#Rogers1Number”.

What are Promoted Tweets

Twitter offers promoted tweets to companies on a cost-per-engagement basis, by which companies pay a fee when someone retweets, replies to, clicks or favourites the promotion. According to Twitter’s website, “Just like organic Tweets, relevant and interesting messages are rewarded above all else. Tweets that engage and resonate with users will appear more frequently.”

This morning, the hashtag #Rogers1Number was at the top of Twitter’s list of trending topics as a promoted tweet. Unfortunately for Rogers the tweets were not celebrating their new service, which it touted in its tweet as “the only number you’ll need!”

Below is a look at how some not so happy Rogers customers were taking advantage of the #Rogers1Number hashtag and promoted tweet to air their dissatisfaction.
Screen shot 2012-03-16 at 3.11.12 PM.png

I suspect it won’t be long before Twitter offers
a premium service that filters out tweets
containing negative keywords, or words
chosen by the advertiser, from promoted tweets. 

This obviously came to the attention of the marketing team at Rogers right away. To their credit Rogers responded with a blog post of ther own describing how they are using the experience to listen and respond to customer concerns, and they used the Promoted Tweet service to let the twitosphere know.

Have you ever used the opportunity to leverage a hashtag for a purpose other than what was intended by the hashtag’s creator? Use the comments box below to tell us about it >>

Disclosure: I am a Rogers wireless customer and will withhold my opinion of their services.

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest

Leave a Comment