Ticketcorner

Great international artists come to Switzerland time and time again. Tickets for most of the acts can be purchased exclusively via Ticketcorner.ch. And that was actually always okay. Recently, however, the church is no longer in the village. Why? On December 12, 2011, the German rock band Rammstein played at Zurich's Hallenstadion. Tickets could be bought online, in call centers or at the 1450 advance booking offices. Theoretically. Because as so often recently, tickets were always sold out within minutes at the official Ticketcorner sales points - only to reappear a little later on the Internet at sometimes massively inflated prices. According to the information on 20Minuten.ch, this is due to a handful of ticket dealers who are leveraging the market. Maybe. The fans don't care much, they feel cheated. As befits a modern company, Ticketcorner also encourages customers to "Follow Ticketcorner on Facebook and Twitter." It's obvious that they do so and naturally use these platforms to get in touch with Ticketcorner. Especially - who is surprised - when they are disappointed. And they obviously are now.
 
On Facebook, the page announcing Rammstein has hundreds of comments complaining about ticket sales (http://on.fb.me/j9uO5A). Fans who lined up at the sales points at eight o'clock in the morning as soon as pre-sales began were left empty-handed. Members who were unable to benefit despite paying their membership fee, etc.... Fans who have been left out in the cold are demanding a public statement from Ticketcorner. And what do they get? An impersonal post that appears identically on all the pages where the complaint was submitted. "Thank you for all the feedback... Due to high demand, only a few VIPs and members were able to benefit..." Always the same. If you look at Twitter, the situation is no less desolate. Here, too, there are only standardized announcements. Not a trace of dialog.
 
My point here is not whether the black market is good or bad. Nor do I want to accuse Ticketcorner of having anything to do with it. But what we are seeing here is a clear social media communication faux pas. Apparently nobody at Ticketcorner knows about the - now legendary - TelDaFax case (http://on.fb.me/mcObhg). If they did, they would have learned from it. If you want to engage on social media, you have to be prepared to have a dialog. 180 comments (an impressive number with 1415 fans) are crying out for a personal response, they are crying out to be taken seriously. Copy&paste posts in response are not one of them. On the contrary. They make things much worse. Because if social media teaches us anything, it's that - as Thomas Knüwer puts it - "for the first time, the customer is actually something like the king".