Flying
Yesterday morning, before my 10 hour dash through the wilds of Pennsylvania, I joined Benet Wilson of Aviation Week and Paula Berg of Southwest Airlines on a panel on new and social media at the ACI-NA Marketing and Communications Forum.
Benet, as I’ve noted previously, writes the Towers and Tarmacs blog. Paula shepherds the Nuts About Southwest blog. Attending were 250+ marketing managers for airports as well as folks from the airline industry, government and related industries.
I started off with my latest rant - that social media isn’t media and it isn’t technology. It’s what happens with the cost of global communication, publishing and mass organization drops to zero. it’s the cumulative impact of millions of people suddenly able to find others all over the world who share their point of view and the ability of those people to organize. I purposely tried to stay off of technology since this wasn’t a very tech-savvy crowd. From the reactions before, during and afterwards, it seems I made the right choice.
Paula told an interesting story about how the management of Southwest Airlines spends way too much time pondering the wisdom of their open seating policy. They finally decided to put the question to the blog’s readers. The overwhelmingly supportive response convinced them they are on the right track and they are (of course) happy they didn’t have to spend a fortune on some consultants to tell them that. And they are happy not being up all night wondering if they are making the right move.
The questions from the audience were all very well informed - people are definitely moving up te learning curve on social media. One woman asked us what she should tell her boss who is convinced that blogs and the Internet are the sole preserve of a small gang of edgelings (those kids and their Internet…). This is a vast improvement from the question I would get a few years ago… “isn’t blogging and the Internet just for tech geeks?”
All in all, it was a fun panel and we could have gone on for hours discussing the topic. That’s for another time.
Update: Pictures from the drive and the panel are here.
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