T-Mobile CEO John Legere Kills It on Twitter
The man behind T-Mobile’s Uncarrier rebranding may be rude and crude but if you’ve heard of John Legere, he’s winning. Very few CEOs can attract and keep 555,000 Twitter followers engaged (and sometimes enraged) the way he can. Possibly because very few CEOs are tweeting about how the competition are all greedy bastards. Or how Pharrell makes them sick. The outspoken head honcho of T-Mobile’s liberal use of the F-word should be the first indication that his modus operandi is in a class of its own. The fact that people can’t seem to get enough of his foul-mouthed style is the second. Love him or hate him, there’s no denying the role Legere’s sometimes crass energy has played in his company’s incredible two-year turnaround.
In his nimbly tweeting hands, four-letter words are less of a crutch and more of a tool. His language – so inappropriate for a CEO’s public façade – clothes him in the veneer of the everyman. When he says, “The family plan is one of the biggest evils in this industry…. Lower prices. That is total horses–t,” it sounds like the kind of off-the-cuff complaint any one of us might make when shopping around for a provider. But is Legere’s salty language as off-the-cuff as it seems? Probably not. He’s smart enough to know that every word out of his mouth is probably going to become word of mouth, for good or for ill. There’s no such thing as bad press, after all, and the media seem to love writing about Legere’s latest roguish outburst.
Raising T-Mobile’s bottom line takes more than making a spectacle of yourself on social media, though. He’s most likely chosen Twitter as his platform of choice because of the two-way access it offers. His customers get direct access to him and vice versa, and he’s capitalizing on that accessibility in a big way. At the 2014 GeekWire Summit, Legere chatted about his approach to customer relations. His big reveal was ridiculously simple. “The truth is I learn almost everything I need to know to run T-Mobile [on Twitter]. On the email from individual customers or on Twitter. I take every Tweet that comes in and I read it. I forward it to people. My executive team gets them, we reply, and at my staff meeting every Tuesday, we track social media impressions, what they are and how we’ve responded to them. It takes a ton of time, it’s a lot of fun… I listen, and I respond.”
And so do customers and potential customers. T-Mobile has now had five consecutive quarters with over 1 million customer additions, partly on the backs of Twitter users who are the proverbial choir to which Legere does most of his preaching. His audience seems to be largely made up of fans of the carrier, so when he sends a populist message like, “We are either going to take over this whole industry, or these bastards are going to change, and the whole industry is going to shift. I don’t give a g–damn which. I can’t wait to watch the peckers scream and cry,” his followers are quick to shower him with favorites, retweets and replies. In other words, free advertising.
It’s how T-Mobile’s messaging has gone viral and continues to make news even when there’s no news that’s actually new. Legere is not the messenger; he’s the message. And clearly his strategy is working.
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