Matthew Petro

2 more cents on Kevin Smith vs. Southwest

Tweet

If you’re reading this post, I’m assuming you’re familiar with the Kevin Smith vs. Southwest issue which erupted on Saturday. If not, read the quick summary over at Mashable, the Southwest blog posts here and here and Kevin’s SModcast episode. The SModcast episode is nearly 1 1/2 hours long, but well worth a listen to hear Kevin’s side of the story.

The social media team at Southwest has handled the situation fairly well. They were quick to respond to Kevin’s tweets and explained the situation succinctly in their two blog posts. It seems that the situation really is the perfect storm resulting from the combination of three things: a) momentary bad judgment on the part of the Southwest employees, b) an individual who’s a prolific user of social media with a large audience and c) a sensitive issue.

The lesson large companies should take away from the incident is this: you need to be prepared for situations like this. I’m not talking about being prepared for this exact circumstance; no one could predict this. I’m talking about having the social media platform in place to quickly and authoritatively respond to any unusual situation.

First, companies need to have social media engagement occurring, period. If you’re not engaging with customers in whatever social media arena is appropriate (Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, etc), you need to, and you need to do it now. Imagine how much worse the situation could have been if Southwest hadn’t responded until executives began hearing about the situation on Sunday, or even Monday.

Second, the team of people who handle social media engagement for a company need to be empowered to make on-the-spot decisions about how to handle a situation which arises. Social media, especially Twitter, move at the speed of a text message. There’s no time for employees to get authorization from management before reaching out to a customer who’s having a problem.

Third, companies need to have developed strategies to cope with different types of problems which may arise in social media. In the example of an airline such as Southwest, they should have thought about how to handle a passenger who’s complaining while at the airport or on a plane. What can the social media team member who’s responding to the passenger offer? Can they offer a voucher? Can they offer to call the passenger directly and then hand them off to a reservations agent for reaccommodating? Clearly, Southwest has thought about this and their social media person did the best they could. The Kevin Smith situation quickly became an unusual situation due to the number of his followers and the publicity it received. Once again, Southwest handled it well, as higher management was engaged fairly rapidly.

Even with all of the preparation, an airline that’s arguably one of the best corporate social media users is still caught in a storm of controversy. No matter what a company does, social media always presents the risk that a small error in judgment will rapidly become headline news. Even so, corporations must be engaged in social media in order to react as quickly and effectively as possible.

UPDATE: Kevin Smith posted a new SModcast in which he talks with Natali, the girl who was on the flight he did finally get on and who was also treated badly by Southwest because of her size. It seems like Smith goes a little too “conspiracy theory” for an explanation for the situation, but there definitely is a customer service issue which Southwest needs to investigate and correct. Maybe the problem is company wide, or maybe it’s just an issue in Oakland, but Southwest needs to do something about it.