British Airways Customer Pays $1000 to Promote Complaint Tweet

This is a supporting post describing the timeline of events that led me to write a post on lessons learned from the promoted tweet against American Airlines. We decided to split the posts into two. This one will show the full background information, the next post outlines 8 lessons learned.

On Sept. 2 Hasan Syed (@HVSVN) of Melrose Park, Ill took to Twitter when British Airways lost his luggage [read our story on lessons learned here: . This wasn’t unusual – customers take to Twitter to complain to or about brands all the time – but Syed took it to an unprecedented level when he paid $1,000 to promote his complaint to British Airways followers.

But my hunch is that his complaint wasn’t simply that, but a business promotion. Here’s the timeline and what made me suspicious.

How Hassan Syed Promoted a Complaint Tweet

Who is this guy?

Syed is president at Salon Commodities. His last tweet prior to Sept 2. was Aug 22. His tweets were sporadic at best – four in Aug and four in July. His Twitter profile also lists three brands which I will come back to later in this article.

Syed waited a day after returning to the US for British Airlines to track his lost luggage and then he took to twitter. The first tweets directly to British Airlines were clumsily composed.

But then Syed started paying to promote his tweets. (Twitter promoted tweets are ads that look like a tweet but stick to the top of a user’s stream and are marked with a small yellow “promoted” stamp to meet FCC requirements for ads disclosure).

What changed?

I’m curious  how one who barely tweets and then stumbles with some tweets suddenly turns Twitter pro and goes the promoted tweet route. How many average Twitter users know how to run promoted tweets?  How many regular users know how to set up a promoted tweet that targets just followers of a particular Twitter account?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not rocket science, but it’s not part of the main Twitter feature set either.

The Part Where Syed Threatened to Not Stop Until…

Syed continued tweeting that he will not stop the ads until BA finds his luggage.

What Did British Airlines Do or Not Do?

According to the BBC, “Six hours after the tweet went live, and was picked up by news website Mashable, it had been read by thousands of Twitter users, retweeted and commented on. It took another four hours for British Airways to pick up on it: “Sorry for the delay in responding, our twitter feed is open 09:00-17:00 GMT. Please DM [direct message] your baggage ref and we’ll look into this.”

Ouch!

Eventually British Airways gave a quote to the BBC: “We would like to apologize to the customer for the inconvenience caused. We have been in contact with the customer and the bag is due to be delivered today.”

Response to Public Inquiries

Syed spent the next little while responding to press inquiries (he received many via Twitter and he took those to DM). And he also received a lot of questions about why he was doing this and how much he spent.

So he proceeds to post the ad results: $1,000 spent, 76K impressions.

Was there Resolution?

At some point British Airlines only made one statement that they returned the luggage to the customer.

Then, when he finally got his bags back, Syed tweeted this:

Who Really Won?

Until then I looked at this as another case of big company social media gone wrong. It was on auto-pilot and that’s a recipe for something like this to get out of control.

But this victorious “I win” tweet made me stop and think. I wanted to see who this person was. I wanted to understand. So I looked at his business brands and landed on the Facebook page of Uberliss. The social media work here looked professionally done. 

The Marketing that Followed

I had done as much mining as I could have. I thought I was done with this. And then I started getting hit with his re-targeting ads for Uberliss, as you can see below.

Whether this was a smart marketing ploy or it happened by accident there’s quite a fortunate synchronization of ads going on here, and my hunch is it’s no accident.

So there’s the rundown of a PR disaster and something that, whether by accident or not, turned into a fascinating promotional scheme. Click here to find out what you can learn from it all.