A New Aviation-Internet Creation

Ron — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 20:26:53 +0000

Remember Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger? He’s the US Airways pilot who landed a fully loaded jet in the Hudson River in January 2009 with only minor injuries to the 155 people on board. His skill and heroism brought him well-deserved fame, but the quick actions of smartphone-enabled witnesses brought his actions to light nearly in real time, as they posted photos to Twitter almost before the plane stopped moving. This event didn’t just catapult Capt. Sullenberger into the public eye. It also changed the perception of Twitter from a forum for narcissistic ramblings to a mainstream social media tool.

Emergency Slide (via NASA)

Now the airlines have given us another social media star, Steven Slater. Mr. Slater is the JetBlue flight attendant who got into an altercation with a passenger as his flight approached the gate at JFK, then grabbed his bags, grabbed a beer and fled down the plane’s emergency chute. In addition to extensive coverage by local media in New York, Mr. Slater’s own Facebook page has more than 25,000 friends and growing at the rate of several thousand friends per hour. Other Facebook users have started their own pages about the incident, including one called “Free Steven Slater”. On Twitter, the event is reported to be the number one trending topic in New York and several other cities

Will Mr. Slater’s instant celebrity, which is owed in no small part to social media, make him, as some suggest, “an online folk hero”? That depends, I think, on whether Mr. Slater’s actions tap into something authentic about how we feel about employers, airlines or both. The urge to tell your boss to “take this job and shove it” is timeless, but people rarely act on the sentiment. (Although this resignation by storyboard is pretty classic). The combination of tighter security, increased baggage fees and, perhaps, fuller planes has led to either customer service failures on the part of the airlines or more abuse from passengers, depending on who is asked.

Perhaps, then, it is timely to remind businesses of every size how valuable social media can be as a customer service channel. With all the buzz that this event has created, there is no good reason for JetBlue, no stranger to social media, to have stayed largely quiet about it. Whether to reassure passengers about their safety (and the airline’s hiring standards) or even to laugh it off, JetBlue should be much more engaged with its customers.

The Zavee takeaway:

Of course he shouldn’t have done it, but the getaway slide is pretty impressive.
JetBlue is doing no favors to itself or its customers by yielding the social media (and conventional media) environment so completely to Mr. Slater.
There is a difference between being a folk hero and a real one, even online, and most people know which is which.

Update (8/11/10): TechCrunch confirms that the “resignation by dry erase board” is a hoax.

NBC, NYT and Loyalty

Ron — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:34:09 +0000

In the course of an entertaining post about NBC’s current “two hosts, one spot” late-night nightmare, Dean Bairaktaris asks, “Where is everyone’s Brand Loyalty? Is it with NBC, Leno or Conan?” This is an insightful question, because the expensive and embarrassing contretemps has been presented largely as Jay vs. Conan, Old Guard vs. Young Turk, homespun vs. hip.

via mashable.com

The potential impact on NBC as a major media channel has largely been ignored, except in posts like Dean’s, as Conan is widely presumed to be able to shift his audience, more or less intact, to Fox or another media outlet. But it’s fair to ask whether the broadcast networks actually have brand equity apart from the shows they carry. Is there an “NBC-ness” to the Tonight Show (or any other NBC program) that would not carry over to another network? That arbiter of absurdity, The Onion, would certainly say no.

The soon-to-be-announced decision by The New York Times to put some or all of its content behind a pay wall also involved a debate over the brand equity of the Times versus that of its content (in this case, the paper’s prominent columnists). An outstanding article in New York Magazine details some columnists’ concerns that in its pursuit of subscription revenue the Times would be sacrificing its position as a leading online news brand, giving up both traffic and influence (as well as premium advertising rates, apparently).

I think the two situations have a lot in common. In both cases, the underlying question was whether the locus of customer loyalty is the channel (NBC and NYT) or its content (shows and columnists). I’m not sure the answer is the same in every case. I don’t think broadcast TV networks are differentiated enough to generate brand loyalty, but I’m not sure that’s equally true of newspapers (I grew up reading the New York Times so I might be biased – or just conditioned).

For small businesses, the lesson is to think about what aspect of your brand your customers are loyal to, and not to assume that all customers are loyal to the same thing or for the same reason. You want the locus of loyalty to be your overall brand so that customers will stay with you as your business changes, whether those changes involve staffing, product assortment, location or even store closings. However, until you have the conversation with your customers, you can’t be sure that they are loyal to your brand or to your personable store manager, convenient location or frequent sales.

As a smaller business, you have the ability to engage with customers directly and provide an overall customer experience that embodies your brand’s unique promises and values. Larger brands often (but not always) provide a product experience that is not as closely connected to the brand. This is an advantage for smaller businesses which, unlike large brands, should never need to market brands and products separately. To leverage the direct connection with customers, treat loyalty as a two-way street. There are many ways to demonstrate your loyalty to customers, but the easiest is to listen to what they have to say.

Zavee Thinking » New York Magazine

A New Aviation-Internet Creation

NBC, NYT and Loyalty