I imagine by now, almost everyone in the online marketing and social media world heard about the RyanAir fiasco on Jason Roe’s blog 2 weeks ago. Brief recap, Jason found some crazy glitch where it looked like he would get a free flight, blogged about it and then RyanAir employees called him an “idiot and a liar” and things spiraled out of control from there.
This is really a customer service problem that has ballooned into a serious branding nightmare. The bottom line is “what do you want the public to think about your company?”. Unfortunately for RyanAir, the world of web 2.0 is here (welcome to 2009 folks) and we talk about companies online all the time.
Alright, that part has been beat to death by every other blogger in this space already. The interesting thing we discovered this morning is a new Ryan Air twitter account that recently began following other travel twitter-ers and caught our attention. First suspicion was that maybe the company saw the error of their ways and realized they should jump on the social bandwagon. Then I read their tweets.
Just wanted all you idiot bloggers to know we can hate your idiots while on your distribution channels. Any questions or comments? Stuff it.
Yes it is true…we are mulling over whether to charge for bathroom usage in the air. It is a great idea, get over yourselves.
For a company that touts how great their customer service is on their website, these tweets seem a little contradictory. Like maybe some bored internet junkie had the genious idea to steal their brand identity, start gaining a following of potential customers, and showing just how on top of their marketing message Ryan Air really is. Just don’t say you weren’t warned on how to protect your identity.
Follow “RyanAir” on Twitter