New dynamics of crisis management (The Net-Savvy Executive)
Nathan Gilliatt has a great post on passengers finding their voice during a customer service melt-down. This is in the context of the American Airlines incident a few weeks ago, and probably applies to last week’s JetBlue debacle.
“Today’s lessons:
1. Blogs can give anyone a voice, even non-bloggers. Comments on an easy-to-find blog can become a platform for angry customers.
2. Angry customers can use social media to organize themselves against you.
3. Mobile phones give customers access to mainstream media now.
4. Camera phones are everywhere (and digital cameras are standard issue for vacations). If anything visually interesting happened on those planes, someone probably took pictures. Don’t be surprised if they pop up on photo-sharing sites soon.”
David,
Great post. Nathan certainly captures how social media is driving a change. I think this may accelerate a broader movement for more companies to adopt a Bill of Rights format in addition to their terms and conditions.
http://markitude.wordpress.com/2007/02/21/terms-conditions-vs-bill-of-rights/
The observations do apply to the JetBlue situation, with one addition: this time, it happened even faster than in December. The JetBlue Hostage blog was up the next day, and traditional media have published pictures from inside the planes and terminals.
On the other hand, JetBlue seems to be doing most things right in response, including using social media to get their own messages out.