Burps and belly rumbles

So far this has just been a duping ground for moans, groans and over exagerated injustices that have rained down on me. If you look close though, you might just find a post or two of opinion and not complaint.

Wednesday 11 February 2015

Honor update - Part 1

So in order to keep things fair I felt I should provide a little update on my experience with Honor (Huawei) since I wrote last nights blog post.

Luckily I happen to know a couple of folks who are far better connected than myself in the mobile industry and a few of them read my post this morning. What transpired was a complete turn around. It seems that Honor have just got round to hiring a new UK social team and I believe that the competition got lost in transition somewhere. Now that's obviously still poor form and no excuse but it does at least give some kind of explanation. The new marketing team were made aware of my plight and acted pretty quickly, in jig time I received a couple of DM's on twitter asking for some contact details and assuring me that the handset would be sent out. They then went one step better which really started earning back some brownie points. The head of UK marketing then personally called me to offer his sincere apologies and hoped that I could start believing in the company, a very nice touch I think.

Now just in case you are wondering, this was not special treatment for me, all the winner were dealt with in exactly the same way.

So why part 1? Well even though I have been told that the handset was shipping today, you don't get redemption until it arrives. When it does I will do part 2 and maybe add some initial thoughts of the phone.

So Honor may just have restored some honour without having tocommit hari kari.

Tuesday 10 February 2015

Honor without Honour

If you know me from social media for any length of time or if you have read my rare blog posts on here you will know that I have only really used Blogger for either moaning or sharing a little on a competition I have won. This post is a fantastic combination of both.

Since I started using social media I have been pretty lucky, I have to date won a tablet, 4 phones (I think), a Sphero Ollie, an Android collectable or two, an imitation light saber and a Harry Potter wand that changes the TV. A pretty good innings I think you will agree. Out of everything I have only ever sold one thing, the light saber, everything else has either been used by me or given to a member of my family to use. Really lucky I guess you would say and apart from Sony cutting it fine to get a Z1 to me in time for Christmas one year everything has been great. So you could say this moan is a bit much, but to me it's as much about the principle as anything else.

During December every social media team under the sun goes competition crazy, there are competitions for almost everything from almost everyone. I know that the spam gets to a lot of folk, but there are a load of chances to get lucky too. Last year Honor (Huawei) ran a funny little comp with a vote for how to punish a bad santa on a live feed. They then randomly picked winners who voted, and guess what? Old jammy arse won again. The prize was/is a Honor 6 smartphone in white, not too shabby at all. I got notified by Twitter DM and was told someone would be in touch to send me my nice shiny new phone. That was a gob smacking 54 days ago (as of the 10th of February) and since then I have heard nothing. You can see from the screenshot that I tried to contact them via DM again and got nothing back. I have tried on a weekly basis to ask them on Twitter what is happening as I fully realise that the PR company running the account will need to wait on Honor (Huawei) to give them the phones before they can then send them on to the winners. I have never once had a reply, no wait that's a lie, if I ask them about anything else I get a reply in about 24 hours but never anything relating to the competition.

Maybe the DM I got was a mistake, and I never actually won. The problem there is that I know another winner (who is also in the same boat) and I have even been contacted by someone I don't know on Twitter and has seen my tweets. She has gone even further and tried to contact them via email, but you guessed it they have turned the lights out and are pretending nobody is at home.

Now I have no moral right to a phone, but I guess I do have a bit of a legal one. My biggest problem is the fact that they are ignoring me. Zero communication at all. If they had got in touch and said 'We are really sorry, Honor are not sending us the prizes to send out and as the PR company hired by them there is nothing we can do' I would have been pissed, but known where I stood. Sticking their heads in the sand and hoping it all goes away is doing nothing but giving them bad press. At every turn I will bad mouth them, this blog post being an example of that. I will on a daily basis condemn them on every outlet I can use. I suspect others may do the same.

OnePlus got a ton of abuse last year for some of the incredulous publicity stunts they pulled, but at least if someone won something they honoured it.

So if you want to deal with a company with honour, I guess you stay away from Honor (Huawei)