Acting Human or Humans Acting Robotic? [Inbound Marketing Inquirer]

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week’s deconstructs a social media #fail by American Airlines.

Tip Jar: Robots Acting Human or Humans Acting Robotic?

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Tip Jar: Human Robot #fail

This past Valentine’s Day I came across a humorous social media #fail from American Airlines. Business Insider published a story about their policy to respond to every single Tweet, no matter how negative. They highlighted one particular Tweet that began as follows:

“Congrats to @americanair and @usair on creating the largest, shittiest airline in the world.”

How did American Airlines respond? “Thanks for your support! We look forward to a bright future as the #newAmerican!”

Gee whiz! What could be more embarrassing than an inappropriate robo-tweet? I decided to find out…

I tweet a link to the article including the #fail hashtag. Their completely nonsensical response was “We were quite busy yesterday with all of the news, Jon. Please let us know if we can help you in any way.” It was so dumb that I decided to try an experiment to see if it was indeed a software robot. Here’s how that conversation went:

@jondipietro “Dear @AmericanAir – please reply to this Tweet if – and only if – you are an automated spam machine.”

@americanair “We’re real people behind the Twitter account here. Please let us know if we can help you in any way.”

@jondipietro “So instead of robots acting human, you’re humans acting robotic? Awesome!”

American Airlines has made mistakes on multiple levels, in my opinion. First, they committed themselves to an artificial policy of responding to every, single tweet – no matter how nonsensical. How does that provide value? Second, they were using some combination of automated software and humans to respond. As a result, they sent a whole bunch of illogical tweets and made fools of themselves. Third, they obviously had community managers with little training and/or idiotic guidelines (if they had any at all).

Lots of lessons in this story, all wrapped up in a funny little bow!

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Reading List

The Social Media Doppler Effect

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