Social Media Gone Bad – bwin Takes Heat Over bewinners

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I’ve given heat to online poker sites that miss the mark using social media and it’s time to do it again. bwin recently made some rather major changes to their affiliates program. The response from the affiliate community has been less than enthusiastic.

One of the biggest issues, which I agree with, is that the new terms apply retroactively. You enter into one agreement with bwin and then if they decide to change the terms of the agreement they should be able to but they should grandfather your previous players who you signed up under the original agreement.

But why they’ve earned a post here is that they set up a Facebook fan page for the bwinners affiliate program. As you can see below, it’s not exactly selling the product.

This highlights another problem many online poker sites make when trying to use social media. If you can’t or won’t staff your social media group properly don’t even bother launching it.

What normally happens is someone hears about this Facebook or Twitter thingy and they tell someone to go set up an account. It’ll be great for marketing because it’s free!!!!! And someone, who is usually already overworked, sets up the social media site and then they only post on it when someone asks them to.

Of course, nobody thinks about who will man the social media outlets when they do something controversial or there’s some sort of scandal so they either let the inmates run the asylum (like bwin appears to have done here) or they send someone in who has built up no previous cred with the community and ends up becoming the company punching bag.

Come on folks, it’s really not that hard.

9 thoughts on “Social Media Gone Bad – bwin Takes Heat Over bewinners”

  1. Pingback: Love Me, Love Me Not — Bill's Poker Blog
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  5. I’d agree that the larger affiliate accounts have terms all of their own and I understand it’s simply a way for them to make more money. Thing is if they are treating their affiliates that way, no matter how small it’s a testament as to how they treat all their customers. Plane and simple, just bad business.

    I didn’t even address the Facebook page as that goes without saying sheeeeshh.

  7. I think they care. They just want to make money on their poker since they’re losing players and it’s costing them more to acquire new ones. One way of lowering the costs of acquiring players is to change the terms on the affiliates.

    But the reality is that I highly doubt that the largest affiliates will experience any of these new policies. But smaller affiliates, who always overestimate how valuable they are, will get screwed.

  8. So now what? I mean really? Bwin doesn’t care about the folks supporting them but are the people supporting them really going to stop supporting them? It seems to me like a one sided relationship.

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