Yucca

Southwest Air oversized Twitter challenges

I read with interest over the weekend about the social media challenges Southwest Air faced when Kevin Smith (actor, director and Tweeter with 1.6 million followers) was asked to leave a Southwest plane for being ‘oversized’.

Kevin Smith is quite a large chap and the whole episode does sound rather embarrassing to say the least. He was basically asked to leave an aircraft because of his size. As you can see from Tnooz’s screen grabs Kevin then went on to Tweet about it.

The advent of celebrity figures or even bloggers talking about brands in a potentially derogatory way is nothing new, but in the case of Twitter it’s instantaneous of course.

I once overheard a particularly acidic chap in a restaurant in London complaining about his meal and saying unless it’s sorted he will tweet about his experience (“I have x many followers you know!”).

The portable nature of the social web now means a consumer has genuine power there and then. The Eurostar incidents are testament to that - the moment one of the Eurostar trains was pulled from the tunnel and its stricken passengers gained a mobile signal, Twitter was awash with incredulous tweets about the experience.

Could we one day be faced with a realtime brand equity index that demonstrates how well a brand is performing at any given stage?

This is true realtime consumer empowerment and brands need to respond very quickly or face a rather public dissection. It’s not all bad of course as, if a brand engages properly with the channel, it can gain equity fast.

Go take a look at BT Care’s Twitter for example. The response time is stunning – their CRM system has fully integrated the channel. With the major search engines integration of social results into their listings, it’s now more important than ever to respond in a positive way. When you get an email from them it has your customer number and your Twitter username you first used to raise a query with them – amaaazing.

There is much talk (and rightly so) about whether or not social is measurable and when the ROI is likely to be realised. The emerging reality is that a proactive, inclusive Social Media policy which empowers all in the organisation is going to be as effective something as rudimentary as a CRM system going forward.

Bring the power back!