British Airways customer buys promoted tweet to complain; BA has worst excuse ever

In case you’ve not already seen this today, you will, I promise you.

A British Airways customer was unhappy that his tweets were going unanswered by British Airways, so decided to use Twitter’s new self serve ad platform to purchase a promoted tweet and amplify his complaint beyond his 500+ audience.

Then Mashable picked it up, and now the whole story has gone more viral than herpes at a kissing booth.

Perhaps more interesting is the response given by BA:

I tend to agree. How can you offer customer service via Twitter, but not staff it to the same degree you staff other customer service channels–i.e. 24/7.

[highlight color=”yellow”]What makes this story interesting is also the very reason we probably won’t care about it the next time it happens–this was the first time that someone garnered publicity for complaining via a promoted tweet.[/highlight] It’s novel, it gets our interest, and unfortunately for BA, they were the first recipient of the such a clever attention grabber.

We won’t care the next time around. People complain about missing bags on Twitter all the time. Heck, people complain about brands on Twitter all the time. Now that we’ve all chuckled over this customers ingenuity, we won’t care again.

You would have thought after the Motrin Moms debacle, that companies would learn that their online reputation never takes a break. You may not be able to man Twitter 24/7, but you should at the very least monitor it 24/7…and we can help you with that. 😉