It sucks to work on weekends, but most of us do it. Especially those who have the words “social” or “media” “community” and “service” somehow woven into one or more of our job titles.
Sure, less than a month after we wrote about Ticketmaster’s weak social media efforts, and Ticketmaster/Live Nation head Irving Azoff’s decision to join Twitter, he tweeted a link to what he calls “full disclosure pricing,” at 10:38PM on Saturday, with no elaboration whatsoever.
Monday morning at around 1AM, Ticketmaster explained by way of a blog post.
Oops, guess the coordination was off on that one. Clearly an automatic post, published more than 24 hours after the CEO tweeted the news. Nice work.
And while the definition of “full disclosure” is highly debatable, given both rhetoric and lingering questions about the need to delineate fees at all, it would seem Ticketmaster’s new social media efforts are out of sync with their blog, which appears to be running on a schedule akin to traditional press outreach.
If that’s not bad enough, throughout the entire weekend their automatic newsletter system has caused an epic customer service debacle.
Monday morning and throughout the day, fans of the band The Swell Season received emails from Live Nation asking them “How Was The Show?” as part of a rating system. The problem with those emails, of course, is that those same fans witnessed a suicide at the very show they were being asked to rate by Live Nation.
Live Nation tells SF Weekly, that “the e-mails were part of an automated system and have been stopped,” however, the mistake was not tended to until Monday afternoon, four days after the tragic event.
With examples like these, Live Nation and Ticketmaster aren’t doing much to avoid remaining an example of a business who doesn’t do it “right.” It takes more than a blog, Facebook page, and a newly tweeting CEO — without social media grace, strategy, or a staff who demonstrates enough passion for the concert industry to work on weekends when an emergency arises, Live Nation and Ticketmaster add to the myth of industry conspiracy which is nothing more than the old music business attempting to ape a revolution happening today – right here in San Francisco.
