EDMONTON – It’s an interesting tale of mistaken identity set in the age of social media.
Calgary resident Wendy Peters has been using the Twitter handle @Wendy since 2008.
On March 20th of this year, she received an interesting message from a well-known restaurant chain.
“They were like, ‘yeah, we’d like to talk to you. We’re actually running a contest on Twitter,’ and he said ‘you’re going to get inundated, likely, with a lot of tweets, so we wanted to work something out with you. There might be some misdirected tweets, so work something out with you that we can redirect people to the right Wendy’s account, and then save you from floods and floods of our contests.’”
The restaurant’s Twitter handle is @Wendys and, since 2009, Peters has been getting tweets accidentally sent to her instead of the fast food chain.
“I get mistaken for their account a lot,” she explains. “A lot of people will just be tweeting ‘Wendy’s’ apostrophe ‘s’, which comes to me.”
So, when the company launched a contest on Twitter, the confusion was magnified. A flyer promoting the contest encouraged people to tweet to ‘@Wendy’s’ rather than ‘@Wendys’. And, since apostrophes don’t register on Twitter, the sign was essentially sending people directly to Peters’ account.
“They had printed a flyer for their Twitter contest, and there was like three different steps I think, steps of instructions they were giving to people. And the second one was ‘tweet @Wendy’s with your picture and this hashtag,’ and they had printed it with the apostrophe in the flyer.”
They contacted Peters online, and explained the situation.
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“They’re like ‘how do you feel about maybe taking a little Twitter vacation and just letting us re-skin and rebrand your Twitter account for a few months.”
Peters agreed, but not before outlining a few conditions.
For the duration of the 90 day contest, she didn’t want Wendy’s to tweet from her account or access her followers’ information.
“Basically, all that happened was I shared my log in information with them and they went and re-skinned it with their background and their profile picture and then just changed the profile description to follow the official Wendy’s account, @Wendys, and that was the end of it. So I didn’t tweet from it, they didn’t tweet from it, nothing happened to my followers,” she explains.
Peters admits it was a little tough giving her account to someone else, even for a short time. However, she’s grateful she wasn’t on the receiving end of the onslaught of contest tweets; customers sharing photos of themselves with Wendy’s food.
“I’d go in a couple of times during the 90 days to make sure I wasn’t missing any direct messages or any tweets of anything,” she admits. “I think in the first couple of weeks in April when I went in, it literally was just streams and streams of their contest entries.”
On June 18th, the contest was over, and Peters was able to take back control of her account.
“It feels awesome. I didn’t know exactly how much I’d miss it because… I have other Twitter accounts I use for different things, but this was sort of the first one I ever started out on, and I’ve built quite a big following on it, so it’s been great having it back. It kind of just feels like I’m back at home.”
So, how did Wendy’s compensate Peters for her trouble?
“I’m definitely enjoying you know my spicy chickens and Frosties,” Peters laughs.
“They helped me out with just some Wendy’s stuff,” she adds, “some coupons, some gift cards… it’s just a funny story. I’m a pretty reasonable person anyway.”
Peters is now thinking about how she’ll share the experience on her blog.
“It’s kind of a fun, feel good, social media story, right. It was a good example of how it can go right, I guess, the way they had reached out, and they were very polite, and let me direct the terms.”
In the meantime, she’ll be enjoying plenty of Wendy’s.
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