For those of you with agencies, the on-going United Airlines PR fiasco highlights the need for a 'Red Adair' firefighting team for social media blowouts.
After seeing one of his competitors skinned alive in the town square, I can't exactly say that the CEO of SW is a smart man, but at least he's taking action.
https://consumerist.com/2017/04/27/southwest-ceo-says-airline-will-stop-overbooking-flights/
But, I could argue that SW may not be quite as vulnerable as United in the first place.
Such teams exist.... @simplytheresa might still have the name, but they hired one of them during the Yosemite hantavirus debacle.
The thing about it is that often by the time they can get in and get in front of the story, they are way too far behind it.
https://www.google.com/search?q=yosemite+hanta+virus&oq=yosemite+hanta+virus
>by the time
Agreed. But a forward-thinking team would work to break the see-what-else-these-bastards-did bandwagon.
I also doubt that a single agency could do the work. They'd likely have to call in a few other agencies.
Oh. Ugh! The h-word still gives me hives. Lets keep talking about airplanes.
The PR play by SW is an interesting one. It makes me wonder how much airlines are overbooking in the first place. I mean, if you know that statistically 25% of your customers are going to cancel before the flight, overbooking keeps the plane flying at more than 3/4 full, and allows you to keep fares lower. So if I'm fare-sensitive, and typically I am, I want the airline to overbook at least a little, unless, they are only overbooking by a tiny amount anyway because there isn't that much turnover. I could certainly see that being more true for SW than United. If that's the case, then the public announcement makes sense.
Reputation management strikes me as a tough game. You have to walk the line between "see what else these bastards did" and "see what they did and look at how they're trying to gloss over it".
>a single agency
Depends on the size and complexity of the agency.
Do you remember who the crisis management team was that got called in for Yosemite?
Burson Marsteller was one of several groups that were brought in. I think they had a primary consultation role, but can't really remember.
http://www.burson-marsteller.com/
From their current site it looks like they do a lot of PR...