It turns out that American Airlines will respond positively to almost any tweet you send its way — even if you call AA "the largest, sh---iest airline in the world."
Early this morning, Ross Sheingold, who works at social media agency Laundry Service, noticed that @AmericanAir thanked a guy named Mark Murphy for his support when he had really bashed the airline on its merger with US Airways:
Then AA backtracked, tweeting:
Now both tweets appear to be missing from @AmericanAir's stream — suggesting they've been deleted. The airline's new response to Murphy is:
This just goes to show the danger of the robo-tweet.
Perhaps the most noteworthy example of an automatic response fail was when Progressive robo-tweeted everyone the same message after a man wrote a viral Tumblr post accusing the insurance company of defending the killer of his sister (a Progressive client) in court so it wouldn't have to pay up.
Flo's smiling face tweeted at angry tweeter after angry tweeter what read as a disingenuous message:
Suffice to say, the company's reputation plummeted.
While AA's Twitter kerfuffle certainly doesn't qualify as disastrous, it does teach big (and small) corporations a lesson of looking both ways before they tweet.
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