Use a captcha that doesn’t look like the scrambled love child of some random word string and a Jackson Pollack painting: Seriously, I would rather you ask me to do long division to prove I am human than ask me to unscramble some vocabulary vomit covered by a spirograph picture some three year old cranked out. After I fail a captcha three or four times, I start to wonder if I really am human…

Don’t require ridiculous passwords: Unless I am registering for a NASA mission control computer or signing up for an email list that includes nuclear launch codes, anything that requires a password can be letters and numbers. I should not have to type out a password that looks like something with 4 symbols and a capital/lower-case letter mix that a 13 year old girl would send in a text message to her friends. If I have to write down my 37 character password, I think that kind of defeats the purpose of security.

Over the past couple of weeks, it is pretty likely that you have seen the news of the FAA fining Southwest Airlines because the company flew airplanes early last year which had missed mandatory inspections. You can read the news at a variety of sources, but what I think is really rather impressive is how Southwest has harnessed the power of social media to really position itself in a manner that allows it to broadcast its message easily and directly to its customers.

Why haven’t we seen a huge internet uprising against Southwest’s inspection fumble? Because Southwest has launched its own PR battle before any misinformation even had a chance to permeate the web. They have done this by having one of the best corporate social media engagement plans I have ever seen. In case you have not seen it, check out the Southwest corporate blog called Nuts About Southwest and take a look at the content they are posting. Simply having a blog is not really anything special: many companies have a corporate ‘blog’ and some of them really do a pretty good job creating either a team blog or a CEO blog, etc.

But Southwest’s is just beyond the basics. Plain and simply, their blog is everything a blog should be and this is what they are doing to harness their community as a source of feedback and as a mass media outlet:

Structure:

• Design: It is simple, clean and uncluttered. They have a large graphic at the top to tie the blog name “Nuts about Southwest” back to the in-flight experience with a bag of peanuts. Their logo is present, but not obtrusively so. The only thing I dislike about the header is that they use two font sizes in the title, but that is just because I am a bit of a typography nerd. But overall, they only have seven modules in their sidebar which makes the site appear very inviting and simple.

• Digestability: Their posts are reasonable length and have consistent formatting and text colors.

• Memorability: Easy, accessible URL. The site for this blog is http://www.blogsouthwest.com/ I really do not know if there is a simpler URL to remember for a blog by Southwest, and that makes it really easy for people who may not use RSS readers to navigate to the site and spread the word to friends.

Portability:

• Syndication: This site is super accessible for anywhere. In the sidebar, there are two buttons for subscribing to either the RSS or ATOM feeds for the site which are simple, straight-forward, and easy to find.

• Sharability: At the bottom of every post is the ShareThis button, allowing you to email any post or share it via any of 17 different social sites from Digg to Live Spaces. This is very important because I hate having to use an external tool to send content from a site. The easier it is for visitors to spread your content, the more likely they are to do it.

• Simplicity: User-friendly post URLs. Each post has a unique URL and many sites will have it be some obscure string of alphanumerics, but this blog uses %date%title format for creating individual URLs which are relatively easy to read and makes it easy for people to see the title of the post wherever they see the URL.

Content:

• Variety: This is a team blog which brings Southwest employees from all over the company to the table in order to open a dialog.

• Timeliness: There was a post on the Southwest blog explaining the airline’s commitment to safety on the same day the story of the FAA fines broke. Immediate response and accurate information are key in making bog content relevant. Since the news about the fines, their blog has had multiple updates with various peaces of information relating to their safety policies, actions taken regarding the inspection mishap, and linking to the CEO’s media appearances.

• Relevance: They are not blogging about high-level financial data, the intricacies of in-flight navigation equipment or promoting themselves as the best airline in the world. Instead they are focusing on things that the average flyer might find interesting and helpful. It provides some insight to behind-the-scenes aspects of the company and surely some of the posts are part of a broad public-image campaign, but each of them is succinct, well-written, and impacts consumers in some way.

Engagement:

• Openness: Southwest has left the comments open on the blog and encourages people to leave their thoughts and feedback. This is really pretty amazing for a big company that they trust their community member enough to allow them to freely express themselves on a branded site, unfettered. This is a vital part of developing an actual sense of openess with a corporate blog. Google has a great blog, but their comments are closed so despite having the most widely read corporate blog in the world, they have no on-site community to back it up.

• Responsiveness: It would not do much good to open up reader comments and let everyone run rampant unless you actually plan to read them and engage the community. In many blog posts, representatives from Southwest post responses to questions, comments and concerns. Without this kind of company response, visitors would never even bother to comment becasue they would know it to be a futile effort.

• Transparency: It is made very clear when Southwest representatives post in the comments by placing their job titles in the signature of the comment. This is one of the most important parts of community involvement: if it were discovered or suspected that staffers were posing as members of the blog’s community, the backlash would be irreparable. If you have to lie to your community, then it is time for a re-evaluation of your entire operation.

• Acknowledgment: Southwest has recognized that they do not blog in a void and they depend on other sites for a symbiotic trade of traffic. As such, they have included a “Link Luv” blogroll which links not only to other travel sites, but even the blogs from other airlines. Nothing says self-confidence by making it easy for people to look at your competitors’ web properties; you have to be pretty confident that they will come back.

These are just general characteristics that I feel take a corporate blog from a press release posting board to a truly engaging dialog with a community. What are some other examples of great corporate blogs, their attributes, or other general features I’ve left off?

Over the next week or so, I’ll also take a closer look at how Southwest is using a wide approach to social media by deploying in other mediums including YouTube, twitter and facebook. Any other suggestions?

When I was writing the post, I got most of my information from a TechCrunch post about Madonna leaving her record label:

So in my writing of the post, of course I linked to the article with a hyperlink in my posts’ text:

And because I used their article and linked to it, I included a trackback to that article in the trackback bar at the bottom of my blog editor. Your form might look a bit different or be placed somewhere else; these screenshots are from the online admin interface for a self-hosted Wordpress site. Also, notice here the site is listed as ‘already pinged’ because I took this screenshot after I had already written the post:

This basically just lets the address you entered know that you used it for something (aka: you ‘ping’ the address) and typically your ping will show up somewhere after the article you linked to. Some sites mix the trackbacks in with the comments and others (like TechCrunch) list the trackbacks before the comments. Normally, all it does is show the title of your blog/post, like this one:

The above screenshot is still below the original article and still send traffic my way every once in awhile.

This was a post I wrote in about 10 minutes or less before I went to bed that night and had no intention of really putting a lot of effort into and it was just because I included a trackback when creating the post that I now regret not really putting some work into it! See, my blog is no Engadget but I get a couple dozen hits a day or so from various sources so it doesn’t take much uptick to get me a bit excited about my traffic. This post is the highest traffic post I have ever had with over a thousand pageviews since I posted it and about half of those came in the day or two right after it went up. But you can see that even just a few days ago I had a pageview come in from that site:

And you can see the huge spike in traffic that post got me in this partial graph of my site traffic (most traffic directly from TechCrunch and another site which linked to me via TechCrunch):

So you can see that trackbacks are really easy to use and can make a big difference in your site traffic. I didn’t include all the screenshots and this story to try and be impressive (because in the grand scheme of things,I am not even in the top 1,000,000 on technorati yet!) but I think it makes it easier to explain the potential benefits of trackbacks if you can see tangible results!

I hope this helps answer some questions people have along the lines of “What are trackbacks? How do I use them? and Why should I use them?” but if I left anything out or oversimplified soemthing, please let me know and I will update this post as needed.

(As a note: I am adding trackbacks to the original TechCrunch article again and also to my original post so you can see another example of what they look like on various sites)

But I just realized how amazing this little blast of inter-connectedness really was!  So far today, I have doubled the number of people I am following and the number of people following me has also doubled since this morning (and I has the 233rd person to comment on Jeremiah’s post!).  Also, I tweeted about the new facebook feature that is a phonebook with all your friends already in it…which then got Nick O’Neill interested, so he posted about it on his blog. (And I see Nick’s article about Twitter got linked in an update on Jeremiah’s original post!)

Anyhow, this site isn’t exactly a Top 100 domain on the internet, but I generate anywhere from 30-50 organic hits a day (I count organic as not linked from my facebook, myspace, twitter, etc).  Well, because of this twitter-madness, I have also doubled my site traffic between Nick’s post, my rather inconsequential comment over on J’s site, and people linking through various twitter-related outlets!  I’m far behind keeping my site up-to-date because of the madness which is finals+graduation, but I think it is incredible how much effect this has had just on my little microcosm of the social graph!

Well, Jeremiah, maybe this is the jolt which shakes up and explodes the twitter community!

This shield is long overdue and is already in place in 30 states, but this will cover federal  investigations rather than just state-level.  However, the Bush administration sees this as a ‘get out of jail free’ card for leaking government secrets…sounds like a valid concern at first, but I bet they would have loved a shield law a few years ago so they could  have avoided the whole Scooter Libby mess.  It’s about time we started making shields that work rather than throwing our money into a black hole for a test that is considered successful if it gets within a mile of the target.