In an effort to thank our fans for helping us hit the one million follower mark on Twitter, we collaborated with Twitter Canada to create a campaign that would send individual messages to fans to show our appreciation. Followers who tweeted us using the #CanadiensMTL1M hashtag were sent direct responses from our account, which included pre-recorded messages from players, personalized avatars that incorporated users’ Twitter handles, or Club 1909 codes that could be redeemed for a chance to win prizes ranging from Club 1909 points and Canadiens jerseys to tickets to an upcoming home game.

We executed the campaign using a third-party provider, Flowics, as suggested to us by Twitter Canada. The company has had previous success running similar campaigns for other sports brands. Unfortunately, due to human error on the part of the third-party provider, the profanity filter was not activated when setting up the campaign and a handful of offensive and inappropriate Twitter handles and tweets were not flagged and properly blocked. Once the error was discovered, the campaign was immediately suspended and the offensive tweets were manually deleted. Flowics has issued a statement on their Web site apologizing for the error, stating it was the first time it had ever made such an oversight for a client. The statement is viewable here.

While the automated reply portion of the campaign has been suspended, prizes will still be awarded to followers who participated in the initiative using valid Twitter handles and existing Club 1909 codes can still be redeemed via club1909.com.



Once again, the Montreal Canadiens wish to apologize to our fans as well as the general public for this unfortunate occurrence.



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Statement from Flowics