Rogers’ paid social media outreach campaign on Twitter was supposed to promote the company’s new 1Number service, more or less a ripoff of Google Voice (with fewer features) that lets Rogers’ cell phone customers make and receive calls from a computer or wireless phone, engage in video chats, and send text messages from the 1Number portal. But the paid tweets, which reached the top of Canada’s “trending topics,” quickly went rogue after antagonized customers who loathe Canada’s largest cable operator hijacked the campaign.

“Rogers deserves every tweet coming their way,” wrote one Ontario customer. “What a national disgrace of a company. I’ll bet my last dollar this is the first time top [management] has had any clear indication what their customers think of them. Until now, they’ve just been busy finding new ways to part customers from their money.”

“Bryck123” took Rogers’ debacle more in stride: “Watching this epic fail is almost worth all that I’ve overpaid you guys over the years.”

Ironically, Rogers is paying Twitter for most of the venting and customer wrath.  Twitter sells a “promoted tweets” service to companies who pay whenever someone retweets, replies, clicks, or gives a “thumbs-up” to the promotion. A lot of Canadians are obliging, telling Rogers their customer service, billing and pricing is a disaster.

Hijacking a paid social media outreach campaign isn’t new on Twitter. McDonalds learned this themselves in January when its own paid hashtag turned into a bashtag.

“Rogers learned nothing from McDonalds’ disastrous Twitter campaign, which it smartly ended after a few hours,” said Twitter user Jacques Roglet. “Rogers has been carrying on for days, and so have their customers.”

Roglet says Rogers’ mistake was trying to use Twitter as a way to reach younger customers with a one-way advertising campaign.  Twitter was designed for two way (or more) communication, and Rogers showed no interest in establishing a dialogue with their customers.

They are now.

In an effort to turn consumer lemons into lemonade, a small army of Rogers’ social media representatives are reaching out to complaining customers to address sometimes long-standing problems and concerns.  Customers threatening to leave Rogers behind are winning special customer retention deals that slash rates or deliver larger broadband usage allowances for the same money.  But it may be too late for some.

“I think if there is some true Canadian identity, something shared by Canadians from all walks of life, it might be the common experience of having your money and time stolen by Roger’s criminal syndicate,” shared Michael To.

But things may not be that great elsewhere.

“I went through Bell, Rogers and Telus over the course of 12 years,” shared one reader of the Globe and Mail. “‘Bad service’ doesn’t describe it adequately – ‘absolute contempt for my humanity’ better describes it – every one of the them viewed me as a muppet to be abused, exploited and soaked as much as possible.”

[Thanks to Stop the Cap! reader Damian who alerted us.]

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Welcome to Rogers One Number.flv[/flv]

Rogers produced this video introducing customers to its 1Number service.  (2 minutes)

Bell Canada Enterprises, Inc. announced Monday it extended its Fibe Internet and television service to most parts of Quebec City.

Unlike in most other Fibe-enabled Canadian cities, Bell’s network in Quebec City offers true fiber to the home service, not a combination of fiber to the neighborhood/copper wire.  That means increased broadband speeds — downloads up to 175Mbps and uploads of up to 30Mbps.  Quebec City was selected for true fiber service because of of the predominance of overhead aerial wiring, which is much easier and cheaper to replace with fiber than underground wiring.  For other major Canadian cities like Montreal and Toronto, Bell has made do with a lesser network that combines fiber and existing copper phone wiring that offers lower capacity for broadband and video services.

Bell says Fibe is now open for business in the region’s boroughs of Quebec, Beauport, Sillery, Ste-Foy, Cap-Rouge, Charlesbourg, L’Ancienne-Lorette, Loretteville, Sainte-Therese-de-Lisieux and Montmorency.  Service for Levis is expected shortly.

The company says it intends to reserve additional fiber to the home service primarily for multi-dwelling units and new housing developments in Ontario and Quebec, primarily between Windsor in the west and Quebec City in the east.

The company’s aggressive deployment of fiber is an effort to stem landline losses in eastern Canada.  Between cell phone providers and cable companies like Rogers, Cogeco, and Quebecor’s Vidéotron Ltee., Canadians have been hanging up permanently on Bell landlines at an alarming rate for the company.

Dvai Ghose, analyst at Canaccord Genuity told his clients, “Bell is now reporting amongst the worst residential line losses in North America.”  In the last quarter alone, 90,000 Bell customers said goodbye, perhaps permanently.

Bell has lost more than 1.2 million customers in the last two years.  Even Fibe may not be enough to stem the losses.  Canadians are not excited by the company’s video or broadband services, adding only around 27,000 new customers in the last quarter.  Bell’s notorious love of Internet Overcharging schemes like usage caps may be partly responsible.  The company enjoys a poor reputation among Internet enthusiasts for its wholehearted support for usage-limiting Canada’s online experience.

Financial analysts believe aggressive deployment of Fibe may be critical to the company’s long term survival.  Not only must Bell compete with a trend towards wireless phones, it has cable competitors selling triple play packages of phone, Internet and television service at prices that are frequently lower than what Bell charges.

Fibe is expected to be expanded to include the entire island of Montreal and some of the surrounding region by the end of 2012.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Bell Entertainment Fibre Internet and TV in Canada.flv[/flv]

An extended length introductory commercial for Bell Canada’s Fibe TV and Internet.  (6 minutes)

Bell this week brought out its saber collection for a little rattling in Ottawa over the Canadian government’s consideration of a plan to set aside certain mobile spectrum for new competitors.

A mobile spectrum auction, expected later this year, will increase the number of 700Mhz frequencies available for wireless communications.

Some of Canada’s largest cell phone companies are well-positioned to outbid the competition, but not if Industry Canada decides it needs to set aside some of the frequencies for an auction among smaller competitors.

BCE, Inc., the parent company of Bell, has little regard for that plan and has now joined Rogers in a lobbying effort for an “open and transparent” sale, which effectively means the highest bidder takes all.

If Canada doesn’t follow Bell’s advice, the company is threatening to withhold advanced mobile Internet services in Canada’s lesser-populated regions.

“An auction for this spectrum that isn’t open and transparent would limit the amount of spectrum available to Bell, forcing a focus on more densely populated centers in order for Bell to compete with new carriers,” the company said in a news release.

In response, Wind Mobile, one of the newest entrants in the Canadian mobile market, said it would sit out of a spectrum auction that favored deep-pocketed incumbents with winner-take-all rules.  In short, it could not afford the prices players like Rogers and Bell will be able to bid for the new frequencies.

Industry Minister Christian Paradis was unwilling to set an exact date or format for the 700MHz spectrum auctions.  Observers suspect if he waits much longer, the auction won’t take place until 2013.

Just three major wireless companies — Bell, Rogers, and Telus, control 94 percent of the Canadian wireless market.

Ever wonder why cell phone companies are upset about new regulations that would warn customers when they are about to face mobile usage overlimit or roaming fees?  Rogers Communications explains why in their latest quarterly results:

Nadir Mohamed, CEO:

There was, however, a sequential slowing in the wireless data revenue growth rate, and that’s primarily attributable to new outbound data roaming plans that we put in place. With these new plans, we put in place automated customer notification mechanisms that had a net effect of slowing usage versus stimulating it to the degree that we expected it to. We’re in the process of modifying how these plans and notifications work, which I expect will have a more stimulative effect and help restore the trajectory we had for wireless data growth.

In simpler terms, Rogers began notifying their customers through text messaging when they were about to start data roaming — the most expensive data usage around, incurred when you leave Rogers’ service area and roam on another provider’s network.  With Canadians visiting the United States and elsewhere, using a cell phone while traveling can get expensive fast.  Rogers created new roaming data plans for customers likely to need the service while abroad.  But their roaming data plans come at steep prices:

Unintended consequences: When subscribers know they are about to pay more, they stop using.

U.S. Data Passes

Day Pass: $5 for 2MB
Day Pass: $10 for 10MB
Day Pass: $20 for 40MB
Week Pass: $25 for 15MB
Week Pass: $50 for 60MB
Week Pass: $100 for 250MB

The warnings that customers were about to incur even higher a-la-carte roaming fees or start to consume their day or weekly data pass had the unintended, but highly predictable effect of getting people to think carefully about using data while roaming.

Bruce

While good for consumers, that is bad for Rogers’ bottom line, so the company’s formerly frank warnings to customers are “being modified” to help the company “stimulate” revenue and restore the predicted revenue growth from the high-priced roaming plans.

“We tried to create real transparency about when people and how people could get on data packages as they went overseas,” admits Robert Bruce, president of Rogers Communications Division. “We put in a fair number of reminders to let people know that they were on à la carte pricing, and we think that these dissuaded significantly customers from using it and possibly created some confusion along the way.”

Rogers Cable customers are also finding some of the company’s newest innovations a challenge to their monthly broadband usage allowances, among the lowest in Canada:

• Rogers Remote TV Manager: Enables cable subscribers to search programming and manage PVR recordings anytime on any device;
• Rogers Live TV. This service lets cable customers stream live TV channels on their tablets and watch shows anywhere they are in the home;
• Rogers On Demand TV app on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 LIVE platform, bringing Rogers On Demand TV to the gaming console;
• A refresh of the digital cable user interface, improving ease of use for the Whole Home PVR and a better program guide and search function.

In the long term, Rogers is moving towards an IP-based delivery system for its video programming, allowing the company to deliver video across different platforms more efficiently.  As Rogers converts the rest of its cable systems to digital cable, it is opening up new broadband capacity — a critical part of the company’s revenues.

Rogers admits it uses data caps to drive revenue.  By moving customers into higher usage, more expensive tiers, Rogers is able to drive revenue upwards as well.

“As customers continue every quarter, in and out, to consume more and more and spend more and more time on the Internet, we think it’s both a great opportunity for us and a welcome addition to the product offering from a customer perspective,” Bruce said.