Over this past Labor Day weekend, one man went on Twitter to let the world know that British Airways had failed to deliver his father’s luggage. While this is certainly not the first time someone has gone to Twitter to vent about poor customer service, I believe it is the first time that anyone thought to promote his or her Tweets.
Don’t fly @BritishAirways. Their customer service is horrendous.
— (@HVSVN) September 2, 2013
I refuse to stop running Twitter Ads until @British_Airways finds the lost luggage
— (@HVSVN) September 3, 2013
This is not a novel concept. Complaining customers are something that no company wants and most will go out of their way to ensure that the customer is happy. This usually means freebies in the form of whatever customer service is empowered to give.
What is novel about this situation is the promotion of the Tweets. @HVSVN is not exactly a Twitter heavyweight with only 589 followers, but with the promotion of his Tweets, his audience drastically expands. What began as one disgruntled customer without much of a voice has quickly turned into a miniature public relations disaster for British Airways.
It will be interesting to see what action British Airways takes in this situation. They have yet to make any public statement and are probably hoping to put this fire out offline, but it may be too late for that. It will also be interesting to see if this catches on, with more disgruntled customers promoting their grievances via Twitter or other social sites. The situation highlights the importance of investing in online reputation management to catch situations like this before they turn into viral news stories.
Going to sleep. Will reveal final spend & engagement metrics tommorow for the social media geeks ✌️
— (@HVSVN) September 3, 2013
We’ll be waiting!
UPDATE:
For those of you interested in the statistics, @HVSVN was kind enough to post them:
Final Spend pic.twitter.com/jgTHLGzlkk
— (@HVSVN) September 3, 2013
Final Stats pic.twitter.com/adNW4JMTAL
— (@HVSVN) September 3, 2013
Breakdown of my Top Tweets pic.twitter.com/87uzlTKiV7
— (@HVSVN) September 4, 2013