Rob Britton OPINION
Responding to social media Rob Britton rues the impact of me-focused media
The instantaneity of Facebook, Twitter, and the rest has dramatically remade the relationship between customer and company, and no less for airlines. So-called experts, mostly younger than me, are breathlessly enthusing on how good all this is and will be. I’m certainly more curmudgeonly in my seventh decade, but even if I were 40 years younger I would still cast a critical eye on how these new sites are impacting on service delivery, customer expectations, and brand reputation. Three recent episodes will introduce the challenge. In March 2014, a US Airways Airbus blew a tyre on take-off from Philadelphia and the pilot safely aborted takeoff; only one person sustained a minor injury. In the spectrum of operational incidents, such a mishap is minor, but within minutes the tweets began, “So my plane just crashed,” with a photo of the collapsed nose gear. Needless to say, news
of the 'crash' went viral. A month later, an Air Canada passenger tweeted a video of gate-checked bags being dropped from the top of the jetbridge to a cart below. Thud! The blogosphere went wild, and Air Canada’s PR team went into damage control. A year earlier, American Airlines got lots of thumbs-ups after a modestly influential customer tweeted AA that he and his family were likely to miss their flight, and the carrier 'held' it for them. It’s useful to remind you of a few stark truths about the Internet in general and social media in particular. First, and most important, unlike conventional media, there are no editors controlling content, and, most importantly, verifying facts. So there was no one to tell @han_horan that in fact he was not in a crash. Second, we must assume that everything is public, and no behaviour is hidden from scrutiny, certainly not falling suitcases. And third, these media are inherently me-focused,
often narcissistic, which is why @IdeaGov didn’t care about the other 165 people already on board his connecting flight, customers who really wanted to be on their way. By definition, air transportation is a collective activity, which often conflicts with a sense of entitlement. I’ll be writing more on this in future
columns, but for now let’s give Southwest Airlines founder Herb Kelleher the last word. Writing almost 20 years ago, Herb said: “The customer is not always right . . . sometimes the customer is drunk. Sometimes the customer is a lunatic. Sometimes the customer abuses our people.” Herb went on to lament the me-focus of many travel narratives, and explained that Southwest’s customer- focused team would always do what was in the best interest of the greatest number of travellers. That sensibility is even truer in a time of tweets and vapid 'likes'.
rob.britton@
airlearn.net
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