As we know, customer complaints are quite easy to communicate online. We can E-mail the offending company, post negative reviews on selling sites, and use social media to voice our unhappiness. But would you pay $1,000 to promote your online complaints? I wouldn’t.
Yet, that is what one customer recently did. Consider this report by Dan Lyons for HubSpot:
“We’ve all heard that social media has empowered customers. But earlier this week, one person took that empowerment to a whole new level. Hasan Syed was a passenger on British Airways. The airline lost his baggage and was slow in resolving the issue. As a lot of other people have done in similar situations where they want to air a grievance, Syed took to Twitter — only he added a twist. Instead of just tweeting, Syed, who uses the Twitter handle @HVSVN, spent $1,000 buying promoted tweets in the New York and U.K. markets, using Twitter’s self-serve ad platform. That’s right: this guy used a platform that was created for companies to blast ads at consumers, and turned the platform on its head, using it as a way to blast out ads against a company.”
Click the image to read more — lots of reaction to this approach!
This story just goes to show how sensitive and stupid a human being can be. Yes, his twitter complaints are fully justified and he’s right to be angry. However, spending that much time and money buying tweets that go against the airline, is a complete waste of time. All that time and money is pointless anyway because clearly millions of people will still be flying with British Airways. Clearly, this guy had an extra $1000 to blow on nonsense, and not much of a life too.
I would never spend $1,000 to file a complaint simply because something better can come out of it for both me and the offending company. I could attempt to make a deal with the company and give them a chance to create some good will with me rather than using a scorched-earth approach. By complaining, instead of losing a luggage, the person lost a luggage and $1,000…sounds like a losing proposition to me!