“Good Night, Sweetie”: Now a Terrorist Transmission?
In yet another sign that exactly one airline is completely out of touch with customer-reality, the Twitterverse popped up a story today about media consultant John Battelle, who was recently stopped, on a wifi-equipped aircraft flying between New York and San Francisco, from using video chat to say “good night” to his wife and daughters.
Which airline is it? Here are some clues:
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“United Breaks Guitars,” Song 3: Rhapsody in Bluegrass
As promised, Dave Carroll has released the third and final song of his United Breaks Guitars trilogy. In a special webcast event that happened live last night (recorded & available here; things gets started at about 04:30), Dave introduced the last video and spent another 45 minutes or so telling a more complete, behind-the-scenes story of both his broken Taylor guitar and United Airlines’ profoundly broken customer service organization.
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Deconstructing United Airlines: Customers are Mere Transactions
by Paul Greenberg
blogs.ZDNet.com
If you’re a loyalty marketer and look at my United profile, you find something that would make you 4.5 on a scale of 5.0 when it comes to warm and fuzzy. You’d see hundreds of thousands of United Airlines frequent flier (FF) miles; a pattern that suggests that I fly exclusively, including client bookings by their travel agencies on United for me; you’d see signing up for dozens of promotions; you’d see using hotel loyalty cards to get United FF miles in the place of hotel points; you’d see me flying United partners Star Alliance airlines whenever I can’t fly United. You’d also see about 50-75,000 miles per year over the past few years. I’d look like a very loyal United flyer.
[ ... snip ... ]
In any case, as late November 2008 rolled around, I received a letter in the mail from United Airlines. In effect, it said:
“Hey, we see that you only have 36,000 miles this year which will make you a Premier rather than a Premier Executive flyer. Tell you what, you give us $2300.00 and we will give you the additional 14,000 miles that you need to be Premier Executive. How about that?”
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.
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Song 3 of “United Breaks Guitars” to Debut on March 2
Just a quick update: The third and last song in Dave Carroll’s United Airlines music video trilogy — “United Breaks Guitars” — will be released to the public on Tuesday, March 2.
Much more information about the song is available directly from Dave himself.
The airline’s Public Relations department is said to be rehearsing comprehensive disaster response operations in anticipation of the song’s release. PR spokesperson Robin Urbanski is reportedly planning a forceful, no-nonsense public statement to be built around the theme “This has struck a nerve with us.”
As always, we will post the video here for our loyal readers as soon as it’s available. 
