February 23, 2007

Prepare to Be Blogged

"Thanks to the Internet, and blogs in particular, disgruntled customers have more power than ever," says Travel Weekly aviation editor Andrew Compart in a report on how blogs are playing a central role in the push for Congress to pass an "airline passengers' bill of rights."

The method that angry passengers used to find each other, organize and respond after being stuck on grounded American Airlines aircraft for as long as nine hours should serve as a warning for airlines and other travel companies: Prepare to be blogged. ... Thanks to the Internet, and blogs in particular, disgruntled customers have more power than ever. The revenge of the angry consumer is nigh if it isn't here already...

"One angry customer can do more damage now than he could in the past," warned Nathan Gilliatt, who has his own blog and runs Social Target, a media research and consulting company in Apex, N.C. "The difference now is that the unhappy customer can have an audience, where in the past they were an individual unhappy customer. [In the past] they probably told their friends. Now they can tell the world."

(Actually, while blog-relations should be a part of a company's overall media-relations and public-relations efforts, a company should never reach out to bloggers using the same methods and approaches that corporate PR offices have long used to reach out to newspapers and broadcast media. Bloggers respond badly to the kinds of PR that still seem to work with the older media. But that's a discussion for another day.)

Compart says the blogging of the American Airlines foul-up is "instructive."

The passengers on the American flight did not exchange information while they were stuck on the grounded aircraft (although at least one of them did use a cell pone to call a television reporter to alert the news station about what was happening). Instead, Helen Anders wrote about Flight 1348 on the "Anders Meanders" travel-related blog she writes for the Austin American-Statesman.

The blog, as most are, allows readers to post comments on each entry. Several angry customers from Flight 1348, and other American flights on which passengers were stuck for more than three hours, posted comments. Passenger Kate Hanni posted her e-mail and phone number for others to contact her. From that small beginning, an angry and highly motivated Hanni began the movement - its effectiveness is still to be determined - to push for an airline passenger rights bill in Congress. Hanni became the de facto spokeswoman for the aggrieved passengers, appearing on nationally broadcast news shows. The newly formed Coalition for an Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights has started a blog and a Google group discussion board of its own to try to build up public support for its effort.

In the case of American Airlines, a bad event generated bad press and a negative mention on a newspaper's blog, which ignited a conversation that was already simmering in the blogosphere. In other cases it works just in reverse - the negative coverage starts on a blog and builds up like magma in a volcano, eventually erupting into the mainstream media.

How - and how fast - a company or organization responds is the key.