Meme of the week: #monsterrevenge

It's only Wednesday but I think we have already have a MOTW winner (and the story will be completely irrelevant by Friday anyway).

OK. Here's the story as far as I can piece it together (with translations for the uninitiated).

Lady Gaga's Little Monsters (fans) had succeeded in making #alejandro (a hashtag reference to one of her songs) a Twitter trending topic. Then Twitter decided to remove this hashtag. Why? Who knows.

Anyway, that sent the Little Monsters into a frenzy so they came up with another tag, #monsterrevenge to replace #alejandro and managed to get that new hashtag to be the #1 trending topic for a while. And, very importantly, trending higher than the hated (by them) Justin Bieber.

Tweets from the storm:

RT @BeccaGaga: night #LITTLEMONSTER s and twitterers ;) #MonsterRevenge won in the end!!

RT @carolmbat: WE RULE TWITTER! #Alejandro and #MonsterRevenge IN THE SAME DAY! YAAAAAY

RT @GagaCity: there's nothing more frightening than an army of pissed-off Lady Gaga fans #monsterrevenge

@MonsterChelsko: Twitter must be in hiding after killing off #Alejandro because they're afraid of our #MonsterRevenge ;D

And the all important one from the very media savvy Lady Gaga herself:

RT @ladygaga: #monsterrevenge too?? You're on fire today! I'm really gonna kick some ass in rehearsal now, got u in my heart through every move + breath

Now that's loyalty marketing for you.

The Twitter dilemma: How to embrace without touching

Back a long, long time ago when I was at school, we had a teacher who stood in as school nurse for a while. He had no medical training and, whatever our ailment, he prescribed a Strepsil throat lozenge. He had a big tub of them so it was very efficient and great as long as we weren't actually that sick.

I was reminded of that story when I received this tweet from Nescafé after my post about its latest advertising campaign:

NescafeUSA @martinjbishop We liked your blog post! Have you gotten a chance to try the Nescafe stick packs yet? 10:50 AM Jun 10th from web in reply to martinjbishop

A response that just didn't connect back to what I had been writing about (which was whether Nescafe's advertising response to the launch of Starbucks VIA instant coffee was a good idea or not).

If you take a look at @nescafeusa, you can see what's going on. There's only a narrow range of tweet types:

1) Approval (or RTs) for anyone who mentions Nescafe positively
2) Suggestion to try Nescafe stick packs for anyone who mentions VIA
3) Occasional chipper "morning everyone" tweets

This, I think, shows the dilemma that Twitter poses for companies like Nestle that have traditionally had a very cautious relationship with the outside world (media and consumers). They want to join this new social media thing but they worry about how to engage safely and how to keep control. Better not give the probably-relatively-junior member of the brand team "in charge" too much leeway, they think, else he/she says something that will get us into trouble. And we can't expect our senior marketers to take on this job. They've got enough on their plate already and they're not that interested.

So they end up with this rather bland, occasionally ill-fitting, half effort where the toe has barely touched the water. Contrast this with the beyond-expectations response I got a few weeks ago from Irritrol, a much smaller company that hasn't even decided what to do with Twitter yet but who is already using the medium more effectively.

First hand report of Twitter-driven customer service: The sprinkler story

Photo: The RD-600 Rain Dial from Irritrol: Me (once again, obviously)

I just couldn't get this freakin' Rain Dial sprinkler controller to work. I was down in my poorly-lit basement turning knobs, reading instructions, pushing buttons with no success. As I reached the point of give-up, I noticed that the name of the company was: "Irritrol," a name that summed up my mood. So, to release my exasperation, I tweeted: "My sprinkler meter's broken so Irritrol = Irritation + Troll vs. intended Irrigation + control." Not my greatest tweet but it made me feel better and off I went to bed. The next morning, I woke up to this message from Dan Winterton, the Irritrol Marketing Manager:

I was given your e-mail by a co-worker that said you posted on Twitter some problems you were having with your irrigation timer. I would like to help you out with your problem. Feel free to send me an e-mail or give me a call and we can see what we can do to help.

So, I emailed him back and then we spoke on the phone and, in the politest way possible, he and a colleague convinced me, without ever saying so, that this was most likely a case of operator error and went over the steps I needed to take. Which I took and, of course, the sprinklers fired up and the system is working perfectly.

So kudos to Dan and the Irritrol team for being in the vanguard of Twitter-driven customer service. I followed up with a "thanks" email and asked him about the set-up for this Twitter service and it turns out that they are still in start-up/thinking about it mode with a few, interested workers tracking tweets and reporting anything interesting. Not a bad way to start for small to medium businesses. I wonder when such a level of customer service will go from being way above and beyond expectations to what's always expected?

Meanwhile, now that the controller is working, unseasonal rain has come to the Bay Area. If I tweet about that, will someone fix that too?

P.S. I still don't like the company name. We could help with that.