Voice of the Customer, part 2: At Southwest Airlines, a Different Kind of Leadership
In my first installment of this two-parter (Voice of the Customer: Newsweek Blog Scopes Out Readers on Best, Worst Airlines) I peeled back the onion of a Newsweek Budget Travel blog-survey to reveal customer perceptions of two American airlines that are polar opposites of each other.
What drives such extreme differences in customer perceptions of Southwest and United?
Read more
Simpliflying.com: Imperatives for Airline Social Media Policy
With Dave Carroll’s third public spanking of United Airlines just around the corner, and yesterday’s sudden, incendiary hoopla over Southwest’s eviction of actor/director Kevin Smith from an L.A.-bound flight, it appears that the airline industry still hasn’t learned the most important lessons concerning the implications of social media on the reputations of large companies.
Over at Simpliflying.com, Rachel Levy provides guidance at the 20,000-foot level in her excellent blog post “Five Imperatives For Your Airline’s Social Media Policy.” Job #1 is, of course, to 1) thoroughly understand the external and internal business implications of social networking, and then 2) articulate a policy regarding the use of social networking in the workplace (including customer-facing functions), and as a business tool.
Read more
Airlines: Who’s Doing What for Haiti
The earthquake in Haiti that decimated the island nation’s largest city and much of the surrounding area, continues to be an extremely challenging set of disaster relief problems and human needs, rivaled only by the 2004 tsunami in lower Asia in which more than 500,000 people perished.
The official death toll as of January 28 is 170,000+ dead. Estimates for the total number of dead, which includes those not yet accounted for, exceed 250,000. Over half of Port-au-Prince’s population of 2 million people is in need of emergency shelter; almost all are currently dependent on outside aid groups and transport providers for food, water, medical care, and basic subsistence.
Read more
Clickable Data: Airline Social Media All-Stars
The use of emerging social media (Twitter, Facebook, and blogs) by the airline industry continues to grow healthily. These venues offer airlines the opportunity to communicate with customers in a way that is much more personalized, immediate, and trend-aware than traditional advertising, PR, and customer service venues.
The airlines that are excelling in the use of social media are listed in the table below, arranged in descending order by a ranking score that is derived from:
- number of Twitter followers (if the airline uses Twitter)
- number of Facebook fans or friends (if the airline uses Facebook)
- number of Google search results for its blog (if the airline has one)
jetBlue: Relationships + Leadership + Innovation2
Author and journalist Marc Gunther offers up some wonderful insights concerning the nature of jetBlue’s success, in a CNN article published last Thursday that was accompanied a day later by a post in Gunther’s own blog.
Gunther accompanied jetBlue CEO Dave Barger on a flight to jetBlue University in Orlando, the airline’s employee training facility, and his writing seems to confirm that jetBlue is the “new Southwest.”
Read more
