Orange Envelopes | Small Business Optimized Marketing > By Design

Friday night was shaping up badly. In addition to turning 50 and learning that I was now eligible to play in my tennis club’s championship in the Seniors (Seniors? Really? At 50?) division, I was down big money in my celebratory poker game.

It was a night of bad beats. Three fives was beaten with three sixes, trip queens was beaten by trip queens with a higher hole card, and a jack high straight was beaten by a queen high straight.

My stack of chips was disappearing faster than a mound of cocaine at Charlie Sheen’s house. I needed help. So I turned to Twitter.

Holding a full house, but running low on chips, I tweeted:

Hoping Quicken Loans can come through quickly while I’m holding a full house. That’s enough collateral isn’t it?

And come through they did.

Obviously monitoring the Twitterverse for mentions of their name, I received a response:

@quickenloans Poker, huh? anything I can help with?

Now it was obvious that both they and I knew that my original tweet was in jest, but the wonderful thing was that they played along. They responded precisely the way my original tweet was intended: with levity. They showed their human side, not their corporate veneer. And by doing so, they distinguished themselves from every other company that would have monitored Twitter for mentions of their company name and sent some canned and inappropriate marketing pitch in response.

Quicken Loans made themselves memorable simply by having a real person respond exactly as they should: personably.

Now why don’t you do the same?

Update: Quicken Loans has been monitoring my posts this afternoon also and followed up with thanks for the positive post and friendly birthday wishes. The result: I won’t forget them, and they’ll be at at the top of my list should I need financing in the future and they’ll be included in my Social Media Studio seminar series detailing successful social media case studies. I love a good story, and they delivered one.