Social Media Horror Stories: Ventra Chicago

What happened?

In May 2014, Ventra - the company behind the contactless payment system for Chicago's public transport - announced that it was going to spend an hour answering questions about the service on Twitter. Ventra has been plagued with problems since its introduction (the system will be required use from July 2014), so predictably, the #AskVentra hour was hijacked by less-than-favourable queries. Here is a small selection of the tweets that were submitted...

What can we learn?

There were around 100 genuine queries, which Ventra tried its best to reply to amongst all of the others. But if your brand image isn't great to begin with, perhaps something as public inviting an open-door response on Twitter isn't the best way to start re-building it. As a result of the backlash...