The biggest defeat on WWE Monday Night Raw this past week didn’t take place among combatants inside the squared circle. Instead, the big loser of the night was WWE’s plan to engage fans and viewers via the “power to the people” text voting campaign.
On Monday, fans were given the opportunity to serve as the WWE Raw General Manager. By texting their match preferences for the evening, WWE was hoping to give fans a democratic majority-rule opportunity to determine which superstars would wrestle one another. Fans were also provided the opportunity to determine match stipulations and rules.
As it turned out, however, technical glitches caused the voting results to be every bit as genuine as the sport of professional wrestling itself.
The WWE now admits that three match choices were affected by “faulty text voting tabulation.”
Per the established rules on Monday, WWE fans could select match stipulations and opponents by texting A, B or C to 46993 (GOWWE). But when the system overloaded (that can happen when you’re fielding 600,000 texts), all hopes for making the live three-hour program “interactive,” were dashed via incorrect voting results – results that actually made viewers and fans alike scratch their heads during the program before anyone knew of the errors.
Simply put, something seemed a bit off when matches were being made that very few fans seemed to have any interest in watching. And the ratings from Raw this past week reflect that reality.
Still, WWE is being lauded for acknowledging the error and promising to give WWE fans the matches they really wanted to see (as determined by a subsequent correct tabulation of votes) next week on WWE Monday Night Raw.
