chau·vin

Over-Tweeting & @ArcLightCinemas

I recently felt compelled to inform my local movie theater’s Twitter account that they were tweeting too much, and should consider creating a separate account just for ticket on-sales. Here’s how that went:

@ArcLightCinemas 10 tweets in 10 minutes is bad Twitter etiquette. If yr gonna over-tweet, create a separate account for ticket on-sales.

Their response(s):

@leemartin I’d respond, by saying thats true on FB, not Twitter, but don’t want to go over my Tweet allotment.. oh crap…

@leemartin wait. I only did 9 in 10 minutes. Phew - twitter universe balance restored

Not quite the tone I expected from a movie theater that charges $15 a ticket. So for fun, I wrote up a nice email via their contact form:

I’ve never had a bad experience at ArcLight cinemas. In fact, I refuse to watch movies at other theaters. However, my online ArcLight experience is being tested by an issue of over-tweeting on the official @ArcLightCinemas account.

I follow ArcLight on Twitter to get the heads up on ticket sales, new movies, etc - and while I’m completely cool with the occasional trivia or fun fact - I can’t stand when this happens at a spam-like rate.

I sent a note over to your Twitter handler yesterday:

http://twitter.com/#!/leemartin/status/51414128962699265

And the response was pretty shallow:

http://twitter.com/#!/ArcLightCinemas/status/51419414616215552

http://twitter.com/#!/ArcLightCinemas/status/51419760881188864

Trust me, I think this whole situation is pretty funny myself. I mean, I’m sending you an email about Twitter.. but I truly believe this misuse of the service is hurting the ArcLight as a brand online whereas it could be an amazing way to keep up on the latest regarding your amazing theater.

Thanks for listening to a concerned movie-goer and keep up the great work!

And today, I received a response!

Thank you for contacting ArcLight Cinemas.

I apologize for the delay in contacting you. We have been having technicalissues with our email system.

I very much appreciate you taking the time to write. To be honest with you,after visiting the twitter page I didn’t even think it was an officialArcLight page. But after contacting our home office, it is indeed. Needlessto say, they were appalled by the juvenile nature of the tweets and willfollow up immediately with the third party entity hired to tweet forArcLight. The nature of the tweets is not reflective of how ArcLight wishesto interact with fellow tweeters and fans. Once again, thank you for yourvaluable input and please accept my apologies for the flippant twitterreply you received. If I may be of further assistance please do nothesitate to email.

Just as I figured: They had no idea this was going on because their tweets are being written by a third party. Note the difference in tone between the above email and their tweets.

Thanks to the ArcLight for taking the time to write me back and actually caring about this issue. Looks like they’ll handle it soon.