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.

Everyone knows customers are important to a business. But a lot of small business owners think of themselves as being in the field they’re passionate about, and they don’t think of themselves as being in the customer service business. Coffee shop owners think of themselves as “coffee people”, restaurant owners think of themselves as “foodies”, etc. But they’re just as much in the business of taking care of customers as they are in the business of creating their product.

I ask the question “Do business owners actually understand customer interaction?” because if you look at the misuse of social media by many small businesses, you’d think that they really don’t know how to talk with their customers. Most businesses seem clueless about good use of social media. Anyone looked at Fair Trade Cafe’s Twitter lately? Even places like Postino Wine Cafe (which is a great restaurant, BTW) can’t figure out how to use Twitter and Facebook effectively.

If you’re a business owner, shouldn’t connecting with customers be second nature to you? Really, customers are in your place all the time. Do you talk with them to see how they feel about your business? Do you get to know the regulars? If you don’t, you probably need to. If you do, then how come social media is so difficult to understand?

Social media is just a way to interact with your customers. That’s all it is. It’s not an advertising medium and it’s not a one-way broadcast channel. It’s a way to stay in touch with your customers when they’re not at your business. It’s a way to become a part of their lives even when they’re not doing business with you.

Isn’t this the holy grail of business? Big businesses spend millions on advertising so that they can be a part of their target audience’s everyday lives. Small business owners can now do this for free. Why is this so difficult to figure out?

Pepsi's Twitter link on their label

I noticed this on a bottle of Pepsi Throwback. Pepsi now considers their Twitter to be of equal importance to their web site. I’m not a huge Pepsi fan, so I haven’t really paid attention to what they’re doing with their brand in social media, but from looking at their Twitter, it seems like they’re doing a lot of things right. They’re certainly doing better than a surprising number of companies which still don’t seem to understand social media or its importance.

So here’s a little hint to companies which don’t quite get it: look at the calendar. It’s not 2007 anymore. Social media isn’t the next big thing, it IS a big thing. Hoping that your competitors are even more clueless than you about using Twitter, Facebook, etc is not a social media strategy, its laziness. Get off your asses or lose to those who do.

Microsoft nearly failed to grasp the importance of the Internet in time, and even then had to engage in anticompetitive behavior to catch up. They seemed to understand that mobile computing was going to be a big deal, but completely lost interest or motivation just as hardware made mobile useful.

I know Microsoft has never really been an innovator. They’re way better at the copy-and-perfect game, but they’re not even kicking ass at that game anymore. Zune? Has anyone even bothered to write a Twitter client for it?

Personally, I’ll be happy to see a decade dominated by two tech giants with deep pockets and much more interest in innovating.

Update: Dick Brass, a former Microsoft VP has written an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times which gives great insider detail as to what’s wrong with Microsoft. Read it here. Thanks to David Bickford and Jason Willensky for pointing it out.

Go here to see the video in its entirety.

Update: Additional big thanks to Brand X Custom T-shirts for my heckarad CenPho shirt and Cartel Coffee Lab for excellent iced toddy. I love that stuff.

Clearly not everyone agrees on how best to do this, but there were some themes which emerged:

• infill - CenPho needs to have a more cohesive feel. “Downtown needs to become a mall” was one quote which was said during the discussion (the exact wording may have been a little different). But the point was not to turn CenPho into one giant Tempe Marketplace. The point was to create the integrated experience that developers artificially create by building places like Tempe Marketplace or Westgate, but instead doing it by filling in the empty lots and allowing independent business to thrive.
• outdated opinions – many suburbanites have opinions of downtown which are based in the downtown of the 70’s and 80’s, when it really was deserted after dark. All of that has changed quite a bit, but many people remain in their suburban lifestyles and haven’t had any reason to investigate what’s going on in downtown Phoenix.
• events – People need a reason to come to downtown and check out what’s going on. A bigger event, such as a pub crawl or other event which featured several businesses may have a larger drawing power than individual businesses attempts to attract people.
• chains – opinion was divided on this. Many people thought that bringing some chains into CenPho would make suburban dwellers more comfortable with venturing into downtown. Others thought that chains wouldn’t draw people, as chains are already plentiful much closer to suburbanites homes. Personally, I’m divided on this issue. Having chains like Best Buy or Target downtown would show that there’s a lot of people living in CenPho, as these stores certainly don’t open locations where there isn’t a critical mass of potential customers. But on the downside, chains reduce the uniqueness of downtown.

To be honest, I went into my presentation hoping that there would be so much discussion that I wouldn’t get through all 11 slides. The fact that I only got to #3 was amazing. It made me feel good about CenPho.

If you’re interested in checking out my ideas, look through the slides I had prepared for the presentation. I would like to explore them further, so I’m planning to write some blog posts which flesh out the bullet points. My disjointed notes on each slide are in there as well, so you can attempt to decipher what I meant or just wait for the blog posts.

It was great to see how many people cared enough about CenPho to take several hours out of their Saturday to come and talk about it. I loved catching up with friends and making new connections. I loved learning from other presenters and learning from the attendees in my session.

A lot was talked about and many ideas were discussed. That’s awesome. But as my wife Tracie pointed out, and as Tyler’s mentioned more than once in a blog post, discussion and ideas aren’t much without actions. CenPhoCamp must be a beginning of more great things, instead of just being a source of awesome discussions.

I heard a lot of ideas in my session and many people made great points. I certainly loved being exposed to all of it, and I need a couple of days to assimilate everything I heard. But in the end, I need to find an idea which can turn into DOING. I hope other attendees will do the same.

It doesn’t matter if Tiger was screwing everything that moved for the past 10 years. What matters is his performance on the golf course. Sure, a lot of what he does outside of tournaments affects his performance…he clearly spends a lot of time on the driving range and playing practice rounds. But if he can find the time to bang a few hotties when he doesn’t have a club in his hand, who cares? His wife does, but his marital issues are his problem. What do the rest of us care who he’s hooking up with?

Charles Barkley said it years ago in a commercial: “I am not a role model.” Neither is Tiger. He’s a great golfer and people can learn a lot about golf by watching how he goes about his game. But that’s all. Just because he golfs well doesn’t mean he can manage the rest of his life any better than the rest of us.

Tyler Hurst doesn’t like stuff and I agree with him. Why do we all have too much stuff? Because as Tyler points out, our economy is increasingly built on consumerism, which means buying, selling and having stuff. Seriously though, what do we do with all this stuff? We put it somewhere. Up until a couple of years ago, we put it in huge McMansions we couldn’t really afford.

This is part of the problem with Phoenix (yes, I’m connecting this rant with Phoenix in some way). People are so addicted to stuff and the space needed to store it that we all think we need giant houses in the suburbs.

We don’t need that.

Try living in a smaller space with less stuff. That’s one way we can get the critical mass we need to live in CenPho. People trading some stuff and space for a vibrant, connected environment. Yeah, urban living is less dense with a little less living space. But you don’t need all the square footage you think you do. Your stuff does, but who’s in charge here? Get rid of the crap you don’t need and go interact with your city. That’s what I’m going to try to do more of in 2010.

None of this is particularly remarkable, and that’s the point of this blog entry. Unremarkable things like meeting one friend and then having an unexpected conversation with another are what make a city alive and vibrant. It’s the human connections that matter. These kinds of things don’t happen when we all get in our cars, drive to work and then drive back home again.

These connections need to happen more and more. The more chance encounters, the more accidental conversations, the more human connections which are made, the better this CenPho will be. The way to make them happen is to get more people there, living, playing AND working.

In the course of the conversation with Tyson, I realized that coffeehouses are good indicator of where an urban area is headed. Coffeehouses are “third places” which are all about people making connections. Where there’s a lot of them, there’s a lot of great urban energy. Given the number of coffee places opening up in CenPho, there’s a tremendous amount of potential energy to be found. Now we just need to use it.