August 24, 2006

Scandal at MobileCom: 1,000 car winners due to a fault!

This piece of news & pictures came from an insider, apparently hundreds of MobileCom customers who subscribed to some car competition gathered in front of MobileCom HQ sometime ago to claim their car after receiving a SMS message from MobileCom congratulating them on winning a promoted car.


The insider said that an employee at the marketing department sent the message to some 1,000 customers (who subscribed to the competition earlier on) by mistake while he was testing the winning SMS message that was suppose to be sent to the lucky winner, and those who received it gathered spontaneously the next morning at MobileCom HQ to collect their car!


Obviously the ground was fertile for speculations to thrive that Fastlink had something to do with in light of the incidents earlier, but putting this aside, i can only imagine the short ecstatic thrill of the winning customers and the sheer disappointment they felt the next day as they saw many of their likes claiming the very same bounty and slowly figuring out that there seem to be a mistake of some sort, a dream too good to be true for many.


The insider also told me that one of the winners was demanding not only the car, but also compensation for the Kunafah he distributed promptly after he received the message! Having said that, i wonder how this will be resolved, and if there will be some sort of compensation if any?!


If i was in charge over there, I'd be creative and exploit the episode by actually giving away 1,000 cars to absorb the bad publicity and boost some proactive synergy out of it by showing some surprising commitment and absorption of the situation!


Not necessarily giving away the promoted car which i think was a mid-range Cadillac, but perhaps some branded Cherry or something in that order, but i don't think MobileCom is brave enough or can even fund such a radical step.

At any measure, here are some pictures to go with the piece above, i just hope my insider is not an imaginative daydreamer who made this whole thing up, i didn't have tie to authnticate but MobileCom already pulled the car promo from its website!















10 comments:

Tamara said...

If that had happened any were in the west, they would have been sued penniless if they didn't give all the people their promised cars.

I wonder what happened to the poor employee who made that mistake !!

Anonymous said...

No Tamara, they wouldn't have been sued! OR had to pay anything!
ALL game shows and what not, come with 15 pages of micro-scopic fine print that when read properly, means that NO ONE will ever win.
Anyway, Mistakes happen! But, I guess in Jordan, people demand that these are fixed by thier way :)

Lets say in the west they take to to courts... what are they going to say? They lied! They'll reply "Mistake" judge will say ... dismissed!

Anonymous said...

I agree with Qwaider. Mistakes happen, and people should understand that. I know they are so mad and they were very happy for 1 day, but this is a company with budgets, costs, expenses, advertising expenses, marketing expenses, they simply cant give cars for 100 customer (this isn not creative).

Ya3ni they can give a small gift for each customer, like 200 jds extra credit, a trip to sharm el sheikh, making them 3 cars instead of one car, and i dont think fastlink has to do anything with what happened. it is simply a mistake.

Their problem enhom weG3o ma3 nas, ya habeebi :)

Anonymous said...

Ouch! That gotta hurt man!!! I mean at least they could make ‎another competition on spot and give the car for at least one of ‎those poor lucky people :D‎
If I was in charge I would announce that the SMS is right, and ‎there is one more step to the win the car, and is by answering ‎this group of questions!!!...something!‎

lol

p.s. Congrats on your wedding man, we did it finally, ah?! ;)‎

Anonymous said...

Basem,

This is an irrelevant question as far as the issue at hand is concerned, but it is very much a telecoms question.

Do they have push-mail in Saudi? I need to use a blackberry there. How do the costs work out if I am to get a monthly plan with STC?

Also, what options do I have if I want the full internet browsing thing? Costs?

Last, do you recommend an RIM, Symbian or a Windows Mobile platform? Which device works best if I am after email access mainly.

Thanks.

Unknown said...

Rami, I'm not aware of any push-mail offering here in Saudi, having said that, I think a more ‎‎"open"-for-options platform will suit you better when you come to Saudi, so you might want to ‎consider a Windows mobile 5 that can be kitted with any of the push & legacy email clients, ‎including Blackberry, people speak highly of the new Nokia set, but seems that Moto have ‎something widely-anticipated in the pipeline.‎

However, if you're fond of Blackberry, Bravo (XPress sister company) will be offering iDEN based ‎Blackberry devices with the original push-mail functionality soon, if your stay in Saudi is brief, then I ‎don't recommend this option, that is when it's launched.‎

As for internet browsing, you can get 3G rate plans that promises 3G connection speeds in the order of 1 ‎Meg …etc, but I don't buy it, GPRS is fair but expensive to use, this applies to both operators (STC & Mobily), ‎Bravo doesn't offer internet as yet. But Wi-fi hotspots are plentiful here, I don't know of a single ‎coffee place or casual diner that doesn't offer it at a very fair price (usually)‎

For more on this and that, check out:‎

http://www.360east.com/?p=458‎

http://dontcallmesheikh.blogspot.com/2006/06/3g-is-here-but-i-still-talk-same-talk.html

Anonymous said...

Basem,

Thanks brother. I assume a WiFi enabled PDA should do the job. I am after email access mainly, and you're right, most places seem to have wireless access.

You have good grasp of telecoms. What degree/uni did you go to in the UK? Mind the nosiness, but only so that I will advise people to go there if they ever ask me about good places for their children, which I am all the time.

Anonymous said...

if you work for a decent company and they are using Exchange2003, you just need to get yourself a windows based mobile device operating a windows version 5 and you get out of the box push email without paying a penny (in your case halalah).
lots of devices to choose from (compared to RIM). Check out http://ce4arabs.com

Anonymous said...

Btw the pics don't really make sense, coz the zain show room in the background is actually fastlink in the pic.. Which means that this pic is at least one year old.... Hmmmm, I really doubt the pic is for this related topic, but mistakes do happen, and tough luck for those who showed up for nothing Hehe

Anonymous said...

Btw the pics don't really make sense, coz the zain show room in the background is actually fastlink in the pic.. Which means that this pic is at least one year old.... Hmmmm, I really doubt the pic is for this related topic, but mistakes do happen, and tough luck for those who showed up for nothing Hehe