Southwest Airlines on the Social Media Defensive
By now, most of us have seen examples of social marketing disasters (Domino’s Pizza, Motrin Moms). The mainstream media and blogosphere love this stuff.
On Saturday, filmmaker Kevin Smith took a standby flight on Southwest Airlines, on his way back from MacWorld in SF. Essentially, Kevin got booted for not fitting into a single seat. He was rightfully upset (read the details in the links posted here) and tweeted about it. With over 1.6 million followers (as of 2 days after the incident, anyway), a small firestorm erupted between @ThatKevinSmith, Southwest Airlines, and his most ardent fans.
Here are some of Kevin’s initial tweets. There are many, many more. Read them, they’re fun.
Here’s Southwest Airlines response:
The next day, Southwest addressed the issue via its blog. Unfortunately, it took a good idea and executed badly. It offered the half-a$$ed apology:
“You’ve read about these situations before. Southwest instituted our Customer of Size policy more than 25 years ago. The policy requires passengers that can not fit safely and comfortably in one seat to purchase an additional seat while traveling. This policy is not unique to Southwest Airlines and it is not a revenue generator.”
Customers took notice, with comments like this: “A heartfelt apology is not usually followed by justification of the action. Pathetic” and “Apparently your mother never taught you how to apologize.”
So the conversation continued on the Twittersphere and on Southwest’s blog.
Finally, Southwest offered this post the next day, expressing a bit more contrition: “The communication among our Employees was not as sharp as it should have been and, it’s apparent that Southwest could have handled this situation differently.”
Okay, so what does this all mean – how much does it really hurt Southwest?
Apologies were made within 48 hours. Kevin Smith even says he’s done talking about it. Southwest has long-standing goodwill with customers, low fares, and an unbeatable refund policy.
Really, it’ll probably just be a minor bump as far as PR crises go. Though things might be different had Southwest handled this more poorly.
The really important lesson from this is that if your company chooses to embrace social media, you’ve got to think about the kind of relationship you want with your customers (ahem, esp customers with 1.6 million followers) and what this means. In fact, even if your company doesn’t embrace social media, you should have a crises response plan if situations like this arise.
Southwest’s social strategy is mature relative to many others, yet according to its own admission:
“It is not our customary method of Customer Relations to be so public in how we work through these situations.”
Southwest may not have anticipated all the ways customer relations might look like with social media in the mix.
Bottom line:
There are going to be very public discussions about your brand amongst your customers, with and/or without you. At the very least, have a go-to response plan in place and provide the proper training to every customer-facing employee in your company.
