There are times when a story just begs to be discussed on The Bella Buzz podcast. At times, the cross-section of internet marketing and mainstream media provides an opportunity for us to analyze and dissect the world we now find ourselves living in. The recent Southwest Airlines vs. Kevin Smith situation tied out topic together nicely.
We begin the podcast by focusing on the ways in which companies can establish listening stations using Twitter for use in a customer service environment. This came from a question posed to Desiree at the Georgia Meeting Professionals International Emerging Strategies Conference she was presenting at. An audience member asked how Toyota could use Twitter as a customer service hub in the face of the recent recalls. We have discussed this type of service in the past, and have seen great use of the network from companies such as Comcast, Intuit and Zappos. This now is the time to put a crisis type situation to the test with a large company.
Using the Search.Twitter.com tool, Toyota would be able to monitor what is being said about the global brand, their individual car models and recall notices. Here is a great article detailing how to use Google Reader and RSS as a way to get a good listening station done. This is a video from Laura Roeder about setting up a good station.
From there, we get into the use of a listening station to become aware of the negative comments that are hitting the social networks about your company, brand etc.. This is where the Kevin Smith story comes in. Without rehashing the entire story, he was removed from his flight when it was determined that he was a "safety risk" on the flight due to his size.
Since Kevin Smith has a following on twitter alone of 1.6 million people, he was able to distribute the circumstances of his embarrassing situation very quickly and very broadly for a substantial impact on the airlines. Kevin also conducts a podcast (Adult language / content .. you decide if you want to find it).
(NOTE: there have been blog updates by both Southwest and Kevin that are still going on at the time of this blog post)
It does bring up a good point for us however. Since he was not following Southwest on Twitter they could not conduct a DM conversation. Twitter system functionality dictates both parties must be following for a direct message. Do future business practices require that a response be made within the same channel that a critique is made? Is it reasonable to move a controversial conversation, with many interested bystanders, quickly off line to a closed platform?
For the very first time we had a podcast addendum that we recorded. To make our case for using the social networks for listening tools, Desiree believes that Jenny Craig, or Weight Watchers or Medifast should be tracking some keywords that would have pointed out this event on Twitter and could have inserted themselves into the conversation in a good business development manner.
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