I was frustrated last week when I couldn’t get in touch with my 
husband to ask him to stop at the grocery store on his way home for dinner. I kept trying call his number but my smartphone would hang up immediately.
My first thought was that I had let my eight month old son play with my phone too many times and his drool had finally caused it to stop working. Hopeful that this was not the case and it was just a service outage, I picked up my iPad and went to Twitter to see if anyone was tweeting about Rogers (a national wireless service) being down in the city. To my relief and amusement, A&W Canada had posted a very creative tweet that not only confirmed my suspicions but also made me extremely hungry for their Teen Burger.
The tweet read as follows: “#Rogers is down? I needed both hands to hold this Teen Burger anyway.” See the tweet and saliva inducing photo above.
I had to write about this because the message was so well timed and appropriate to the situation. It was dinner time (around 6pm) and I was hungry and frustrated that my phone wasn’t working. The tweet answered my question and suggested that I go out and get a burger. If there had been an A&W burger restaurant in my neighbourhood, I definitely would have put my son in his stroller and gone out to get one.
There are countless examples of hashtag marketing gone wrong. Some companies just don’t think before they use a trending hashtag (or don’t research the source) to promote their own product or service and end up making their business look bad. But this is a tale of Twitter marketing triumph. The message went viral and was re-tweeted over 350 times. Well done A&W Canada.
Thanksgiving is over and I won’t be craving turkey again for a while. Instead, I am salivating at the thought of putting down my smartphone, laptop or tablet and biting into a Teen Burger – with both hands, of course.