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If you took some time off yesterday to spend it with a loved one,  you might of missed the Twitter cage match that went down between writer, actor and director Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines.  I am not going to supply the blow by blow details, but you can read all about it on Gawker.

To summarize what took place, Kevin Smith was removed from a Southwest Airline plane because the captain deemed him too large to fly in just one seat.  According to reports, Kevin was strapped in and on the plane and was forced to get his things and leave the plane before takeoff.

If something like this happened to you, you would be embarrassed and probably pretty pissed off.  Kevin was and immediately took to his Twitter account with more than 1 million followers to express his anger and frustration towards Southwest Airlines.

This incident and Southwest Airlines “size policy” is going to be debated for weeks.  I think both sides have valid points.  Though this is not what I want to cover in this post.  What I want to focus on is the great social media case study this incident represents.

An out of touch captain for Southwest Airlines kicks a famous person off of his plane.  Kevin Smith would absolutely be considered an influencer as he has more than a million Twitter followers, not to mention millions more who watch his movies, read his books and listen to his podcasts.  No matter who you believe is right or wrong, you have to take your hat off to Southwest Airlines for how they handled this crisis.

Let’s remember that all this took place beginning Saturday night and things got interesting  Sunday Valentine’s Day.  Let’s break down the game film:

Kevin Smith sent out the first tweet on this incident at 8:52 pm on Saturday Feb 13th:

ThatKevinSmith: Dear @SouthwestAir – I know I’m fat, but was Captain Leysath really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated?

Southwest replied to Smith’s tweet a little under six hours later on Sunday Feb 14 at 3:10 am:

@SouthwestAir “Hopefully you received our voicemail earlier this evening” All lines checked, no voicemail message on any 323. Try again.

This began a back and forth Twitter throw down that Southwest Airlines could not win.  When you are dealing with an influencer who has the backing of his people, right or wrong, the people are going to have their say against the big bad corporation. This is where Southwest’s social media strategy truly took flight.

They did the following:

• They responded to each individual who tweeted to @SouthwestAir about the situation.  No matter how mean the tweet was, they responded.  They apologized that Mr. Smith had to go through what he did and explained their company policy.
• They posted a blog post once again apologizing, but also explained the airlines position.  When their blog went down because of all the traffic they were receiving, they moved their blog post to another Web site so people could read it.
• If you check out the comments on the blog post, you will see users who left comments with curses and writing some not so nice things about Southwest.  Did they remove these comments or take the easy route and just turn the comments off, no. (Note: the Web site is still real slow because of all the traffic they are getting.  You might not be able to get to this page.)
• They had a VP from Southwest reach out and speak to Kevin Smith on the phone.

Can I remind you that all this took place on a Sunday.  How many large publicly traded corporations could of turned all this around within eight hours during the work week let alone on a holiday weekend?

Whether you agree or disagree with Southwest and the incident, the one thing I think we can all agree upon is how well Southwest has handled this crisis.  Instead of running and hiding, they immediately engaged in the online conversations.  They did so without legal or corporate communications double speak,   their responses were conversational and honest.  They knew they were going to take a beating but still decided to pull up a chair and be a part of the conversation.  More corporations should learn from this incident and how Southwest dealt with a crisis in the electronic age.

Special shout out has to go to Christi Day.  She is a member of Southwest’s Social Media team and was the author of the blog posts, comments and tweets this weekend.  Christi did a phenomenal job during what had to be a challenging time.

When I have developed and presented social media training for C-suites and Corporate Communications clients,  I try to get across a couple of main points.

• In social media, you cannot control the conversation.  Don’t even try.  Your goal is to listen, understand, engage and potentially influence.
• You are never going to make everyone happy or solve everyone’s problem.  Using this case study as an example, Kevin Smith is not going to be a fan of Southwest Airlines no matter what they say now.  But Southwest understands that they are fighting for the hearts and minds of the thousands possibly millions of other people who are witnessing and discussing this incident online.
• Finally, half the battle is just showing up.  Southwest knew they could not win this argument.  They knew they were going to take their lumps, but they understood that not engaging in these conversations would be shortsighted and deliver far worse results.

What I think more corporate executives need to realize is something like this will at some time happen to their company.  It is not a question of if, but when.

It has already been wildly reported on the announcement from Facebook that they are going to be selling ads on users’ profile pages on items that users might have already purchased or recommended for others. In layman’s terms, Facebook is hoping to deliver the best targeted ads that we have ever seen online. An example of that might be if someone goes to Amazon and purchases a book. Amazon would ask the buyer at the time of purchase, would you like this purchase to be included on your Facebook profile? If you say yes, every single one of your friends will see the book you bought and where you bought it from. Very cool, but also a bit creepy.

I think anyone who has been in this business knew that this was eventually coming from Facebook. Now the question is whether it is going to work? I think there are still a lot of unanswered questions. The first one of my list would be whether this is going to piss off Facebook users? Facebook has always been the anti-MySpace. While MySpace was the wild wild west and when you signed on you got thirty different flashing and totally annoying banners and pop-ups. While at Facebook, you logged in and got exactly what you were expecting, the run down on everything that your friends have been doing all nicely structured and controlled. How much of that will change?

Another important question and still an inherent problem with online advertising is that for Facebook advertising to be successful, users are going to have to leave their beloved Facebook and go somewhere else. So again, using the Amazon example I used earlier, if I see one of my friends purchased a book, I am going to have to leave Facebook and go over to Amazon to buy it as well. We have seen a multitude of data that people do not like leaving their cozy little social networks.

And my final question would be how is Facebook going to handle the high wire act between targeted advertising with their users privacy? Facebook members love Facebook and they trust Facebook. Now that Facebook is going to be mining this incredible wealth of data they are capturing each and everyday to better target users for advertising, will Facebook lose that all important trust factor with its users?

These are all important issues and in my opinion, Mark Zuckerberg has continually made the right calls so I think he is going to be successfully doing this as well. I still get a little dizzy when I think of him turning down 1 BILLION dollars from Yahoo many months ago, but look who is laughing now.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, targeted ads, Amazon, online advertising, privacy, Yahoo

I received a great deal of email from folks who had thoughts on my previous post, MySpace is Finished. Unfortunately, I wrote something that generated a lot of interest and my database craps out on me causing the comments not to work. But I do appreciate the people who took the time to drop me an email with their thoughts, thank you. Since others could not see all the emails I received and all the questions that were raised, I thought I would post a follow up.

Several emails I received said pretty much, “MySpace is free and you get what you pay for.” This I find very hard to agree with. Even though we do not pay to become a member of MySpace or any other social network for that matter, we as users give MySpace something far more valuable than a few dollars. We give them our time and attention. Think about the amount of time people spend within the MySpace walls and community? For a business that makes their revenues through online advertising, there is nothing more important. And for that reason alone, MySpace should have a singular focus on delivering the best user experience possible on their site for their members. In my opinion, not only does MySpace not deliver a good user experience, the web site has terrible navigation, atrocious look and feel and more error messages than a beta version of Windows Vista. How does a web site expect to continually grow when the product your selling, your web site, is broken to say the very least?

MySpace even after continued attempts has non-stop spam going through every facet of the web site. There is no enforcement or pro-activeness to try to stop the deluge of profile, comment and email spam. All of this adds up to only one thing, a terrible user experience.

What this says to me is that MySpace is forgetting who is truly important to them – their members! Because without you and I and the millions of other members coming on daily and updating our blogs, adding new content to our profile pages, sending emails to friends, etc, etc. They have no business.

Now let’s look at this in another way. I am assuming most of my readers are marketers. MySpace recently announced a new targeted advertising program that they call “Interest targeting” which they will be pulling content from members profiles and based on what that user has written on his page, MySpace will tailor ads towards that content. This should not come to a big surprise to anyone as everyone is moving into that direction. I guess my question is what type of company would actually take advantage of this service or for that matter any other MySpace service? Even if, my target market were youths as a CEO of a company would I be willing to risk having my brand being advertised on profile pages that could have a picture of a half naked woman on it or a guy with a picture of a swastika? Who would be willing to jeopardize their brand by advertising on MySpace?

This time I am hoping comments are working.

Technorati Tags: MySpace, social network, online advertising

I hadn’t logged onto my MySpace page in several months. I saw via email that I received a message from a friend I had not spoken with in quite a long time in MySpace so I decided to login to see her message. As I logged into MySpace, the only thing that I could do was shake my head in disgust.

When I first registered on MySpace several years ago, I thought it was one of the coolest things I had ever seen in cyberspace. A place where you can communicate with friends, meet new people with common interests as well as listen to music that you could not find on regular radio. As I logged in today, what I saw was a once proud neighborhood in cyberspace now turned into a sleazy back alley filled with nothing other than porn and spam.

As I said, I had not logged into MySpace in quite a while so I had several hundred messages in my inbox. Out of 107 unread messages, 100 of them were spam from profiles that no longer existed. There were 17 new comments posted, 10 of them were spam of one kind or another including a guy selling iPhones and a couple of links that went to spyware sites.

As I was deleting these messages, I was really excited when several new pop-up advertisements were served to me, beating my pop-up blocker and causing several new daughter windows to be opened. Nice MySpace, good idea to serve pop-up ads to the people who are most important to you – your users.

I thought maybe since I was already logged in, I might check out the music section and see if there was any new music that interested me. Unfortunately, I tried to click on several different links and each link brought me to that error page that says the MySpace team has been notified of the problem. Could you imagine if someone was actually getting notified each time there was an error on MySpace? The guy would never have a second to sleep, let alone eat or go to the bathroom.

As I surfed around, I looked at the advertisements that was on MySpace. They were all the same things. “Click here to get a free iPhone”. “Which rapper is this a picture of?” “Get a free ringtone today!”. All the lowest kind of advertising by the lowest kind of advertisers.

It’s really sad to be honest with you. MySpace was such a great idea and had so much potential and possibilities. Unfortunately, the founders got rich and Fox would not understand social media if it walked up to them and introduced himself. I finally made a decision that I think it is not in my best interest to have a profile on MySpace anymore. I decided to send some last emails to friends with my email address so they can contact me outside of MySpace.

Tom, you are not my friend anymore and I hope all that money you guys got from Fox will ease the pain of knowing just what you could of accomplished and just how far you guys have fallen.

A report recently released by the North Carolina Attorney General states that MySpace has identified more than 29,000 registered sex offenders all members of the MySpace community. This is more than four times the amount News Corp, the owner of MySpace said they identified back in May. This news came to light during a hearing in front of the North Carolina state House of Representatives — which is considering a bill, already passed by the state Senate, that would require parental consent for children to join MySpace.

I don’t think this comes to a huge surprise to anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the last couple of years. For a sex offender, MySpace must be like shooting fish in a barrel.

I do think that some sort of regulations need to be put into place for not only MySpace, but all social networks when we are dealing with underage children. Though unfortunately, when law makers get involved they either go way overboard on the restrictions or they make laws that make absolutely no sense because they do not understand the internet, technology and especially social networks.

My question here is where are the parents? Don’t the parents have to take some sort of responsibility here when it comes to monitoring what their kids are doing in cyberspace? I don’t think I have the answers on this, do you?

Technorati Tags: MySpace, sex offenders, News Corp

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been lucky enough to be meeting with some of our Fortune 500 clients who are finally coming around to the fact that social marketing and all this wacky web 2.0 stuff is not going away. It has been interesting for me to hear these senior executives of these companies ask questions using these “buzz” terms when in reality they don’t really understand the questions they are asking let alone any answers that I could give.

I was meeting with a small group today and the meeting began with a number of people talking about their priorities for their company in the coming year. What they want to accomplish, what needs to get done and they were looking for my team to come up with some marketing tactics to meet and hopefully exceed their goals. I allowed them to speak for a bit and then someone turned to me and asked me a question. Instead of answering the question, I posed a different one. I asked a fairly simple question,

“What are your customers saying?”

The room was quiet so I added to the question. “What do your customers like? What don’t they like? Where areas do they believe you are failing as a company and where are you succeeding?” After a little more silence, someone jumped in and said, “We believe that they are happy with….” I interrupted him.

“What do you mean, you believe? Is this your opinion or actual opinions of your customers?”

I did not want the silence to go on any more so I began reciting quotes that I pulled from blogs, discussion boards and web sites from customers of their company. Some were good and some were not so good.

I moved forward and told the group that discussing specific tactics at this time is premature. We need to first find and understand what people are presently saying about their company and their services. Once we have been able to collect and analyze this information, we then can start talking about specific initiatives and tactics that will address the concerns and issues in this customer feedback.

My point to all this is that what marketing mediums and tactics that are used in marketing programs are really somewhat irrelevant until we as marketers can show and prove to our clients that before they do anything, they need understand who their clients/customers are and even more importantly, understand what they are thinking and feeling.

A co-worker of mine, Tola, came up with an incredibly basic, but truly to the point definition of social marketing, “Taking a one way broadcast and making it into a two-way conversation”…

What do you think? What’s your definition of social marketing?

Technorati Tags: Fortune 500, web 2.0, social marketing

…. But at least I am enjoying the ride”.

So my friend Tola sent me this link from TechCrunch that in the next 24 hours, Dead.net will be relaunching as a full blown social network for of course DeadHeads!!

Now even though I play a tech-web marketing geek during the day, underneath my button down shirts and slacks beats the heart of a unshaven, dirty, tie-dyed hippie wishing he could hit the road like the old days and not come back. It sucks getting old doesn’t it?

Oh by the way, my girlfriend last night pointed out that I have a bald spot on the top of my head.

Life was so much easier when I was doing drugs… Oh well…..

Facebook announced this week their “next evolution of Facebook”, the Facebook platform. I have been waiting to write about this till after I was able to read all the info on this. I believe this is a HUGE step for Facebook and will be critical for the eventual domination over the likes of MySpace.

Just to quickly summarize what this Facebook platform is, it enables outside vendors, companies, etc. to build “widgets” that can be integrated into Facebook users profiles, main pages, etc. Unlike MySpace who has no formal development policy and depending on what mood they are in and whether their servers are up or not, has pulled and blocked apps for at times no apparent reason other than that they can. Facebook has built an architecture, rules and procedures for integrating with Facebook.

Let me give an example. Amazon can now build a widget very much like they have for blogs that Facebook users can list on their profile what books, music, games, etc. they are using right now. Each one of these can be linked to Amazon so users can be driven from a Facebook profile page directly to a product page within Amazon to buy.

I believe the real challenge for Facebook will be how much control are they going to give to these outside vendors and if some of these apps become successful, will they want a piece of that pie?

Either way I believe this is a huge step forward for Facebook and in the long run this among many other things Facebook is doing will spell the demise of MySpace. What do you think?

Technorati Tags: Facebook platform, Facebook, MySpace, widgets, Amazon

This is a real interesting story about an individual who started a profile page on MySpace for Presidential candidate Barack Obama more than two years ago and then just recently, the guy got kicked to the curb and MySpace gave control of the profile over to the Obama campaign. What is even more interesting is that profile has lost a significant number of friends because of this incident. Please see the video below.

I don’t think this is going to be the last time we hear something like this happening when it comes to the web and politics. I am torn over this story to be honest. When I first heard about it, I thought I was going to jump all over the Obama campaign. But now after hearing the story and the issue was the guy wanted money, I am not so sure. If the guy started this profile more then 2 years ago, it seemed to me that he started this because he believed in the candidate, but now all of a sudden he wants some cash? What do you think?

Technorati Tags: MySpace, Presidential candidate, Barack Obama

If you have not been introduced to Maki yet, it is time you do so. He writes some of the most in depth and well written articles on anything and everything regarding social media. He has another incredibly well done post on the in’s and out’s of Reddit. If done correctly, Reddit can be a valuable resource for driving traffic to your site and Maki lays out just how to do it. Check it out.