Shortly after announcing a price hike last week, British Gas invited the public to tweet their Customer Service Director with the hashtag “#AskBG”. Unfortunately for BG, as the BBC put it, this Q&A “didn’t go to plan”.

For the 35 tweets it sent, British gas got 14,000 responses in the space of a few hours, and, as our social media probe picked up, sarcasm was de rigueur. The most retweeted comment was “Dear British Gas, is it cheaper for one to burn £20 notes than put the heating on this Winter? #AskBG” which was retweeted 922 times. Yet, maybe because BG decided to quit after 35 tweets, the storm was short lived, and the conversation died out within hours.

Good move or wrong use of social media? To decide, check out the dashboard below. Click on “details” to read the tweets themselves and on “words” for a heatmap of the vocabulary used throughout the conversation.

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