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?

Then, in late October, NBC also decided to cancel its YouTube channel which was created back in June 2006 for its short clips…but all anyone ever watched was SNL shorts/skits. With that channel, NBC had made YouTube legit in the marketplace and helped lock up the Google acquisition, not to mention it gave NBC street-cred (web-cred?) with online content users (aka everyone under 35). In lieu of it’s YouTube channel, NBC revamped its websites for content: the streaming full episodes are awesome quality (though I wish I didn’t have to switch back to full screen after every commercial break) but if you want a case study for disaster, check out the SNL video page.

Over the past 30 minutes or so, I have browsed the user comments on the site and have seen two positive ones that were about a clip being funny. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of negative comments ranging from the mundane opinions to extreme rants which reminds me of the Wal-Mart vs. Target facebook model discussion Jeremiah had going some weeks ago on his site (and facebook group): Wal-Mart had thousands of negative comments on their facebook group and the hits just kept coming. This is exactly what is happening to NBC on its own site. Some of my favorite comments:

“This site is worthless….now if the clips we want to see aren’t available on this site we cannot see them anywhere. You guys suck.”

“I just want to watch the Lazy Sunday video. It’s fine if you don’t want it on Youtube, but then at least make it accessible somewhere else!”

“IM GOING TO YOUTUBEEEE”

“This site is a joke. Guess what? It’s 2007…YouTube is your friend…viral marketing is good.You think that by controlling the content and then bombarding people with advertising that nobody wants to see is the answer…bad move. $100 bucks says your back on YouTube in a month after this fails miserably.Hire a 4th grader to run your online marketing.”

“your website is a good reflection of where your sho is going.”

“My hatred is palpable for this failure of a website.”

“Even the time is wrong.”

“you know things are f’d up when the ads don’t even work.”

“The fact that every clip starts with an ad proves that you guys suck!”

These are a pretty good cross-section of the comments on the site as of this morning. Let me tell you, I am no web developer, but I think I could build a better video distribution site on my own site (via Wordpress). There is no catalog of clips of guide to finding your favorite videos, no way to embed videos on other sites, and when the player does work, they have included front-end advertisements! Didn’t YouTube find the perfect solution to front-end ads, since no one watches them anyway? Oh wait…NBC left YouTube…bummer. NBC has built a widget that you can embed in your website which will display content that NBC will change and update each week. Wait…NBC controls the content? On my site? Hmmm…yeah that’s not going to work for me. Although even if you could control it, good luck finding anything worth displaying: the new site doesn’t have the most recent ‘Digital Shorts’ that have been hugely popular: Lazy Sunday, Iran so Far, and Dick in a Box. The only reason those have been so popular is because they went viral while hosted on YouTube! But good luck finding them anywhere now.

The only good thing I can say about this site is that NBC isn’t moderating the comments. At least they are leaving it open to criticism, which I’m sure is causing quite a few bruised egos around their offices. NBC is completely missing the point on viral marketing and social media: companies no longer control information. Users control everything from what gets watched to how it gets watched. They are really going to have to step up the game on this new site if they want any kind of sizable online presence…and Hulu had better rock…and open up for business sometime very soon.

Tips for NBC:

1) Go back to YouTube…or if our ego is damaged, just rebuild your webiste into a YouTube clone so we can browse, embed, and view whatever content we want.
2) Fire Jeff Zucker…old people only look at immediate, tangible ROI…they don’t understand online community development
3) Scrap Hulu. The name means everything from ‘butt’, ‘cease’, or ‘desist’, depending on what language you are using.
4) Stop whining about iTunes prices. They haven’t nailed down market dominance in the video world yet, but it is only a matter of time and you are going to want to be on board for that. Ever heard of Steve Jobs? He takes no prisoners and once he controls the market, good luck getting into it ever again. Don’t be the Zune of the video market.
5) Heroes is a winner. So is 30 Rock..and I hear some people like Scrubs, too. Run with the good ones, leave the riffraff like Bionic Woman for CBS.

UPDATE: (9:30 pm 11/4/07) TechCrunch just posted a clip of an hilarious iPhone commercial spoof done on Saturday Night Live, but the clip is embedded from YouTube…I wonder how long that will survive before it gets yanked from YouTube only to disappear into the realm of “clips-you-will-never-see-again-because-we-are-afraid-of-the-internets”…

As one insightful TechCrunch reader posted: NBC hates Apple. NBC hates YouTube.

Brad Jashinsky

November 4th, 2007 at 8:16 pm

This post is so great in so many ways. As others have mentioned, you have an obviously hacked iPhone clearly displayed on NBC (Apple’s enemy). At the same time, I just watched the clip not on TV, but on YouTube (NBC’s enemy). Probably the most surprising is that this was actually funny, and yet was allowed on Saturday Night Live.

(via TechCrunch 11/4/07)

UPDATE: (11:50 pm 11/4/07) Now you see it, now you don’t!  The SNL clip is now down from YouTube, and thus TechCrunch as well…judging by user comments, it came down sometime between 8:15 and 9:30 pm (CST).  So now anyone who will read that article over the next few days or weeks will wonder what exactly it was about since they can’t see the clip.  I wonder how many thousands of potential viewers NBC is missing out on just from this one post…

But while word-of-mouth is a strong force in the general marketplace, it is THE force with the college demographic. From the time kids are old enough to understand wrong from right, we start telling them over and over: “Don’t give in to peer pressure!” Generally, we tell them this to keep them away from drugs and alcohol as youngsters, but it seems they never think to resist peer pressure when it involves anything else! How many study sessions or term papers have been procrastinated because a student’s friends decided to go downtown for the night? People frequently observe that as individuals, people are generally pretty smart; it is in groups that the ‘madness of the mob‘ takes over.

This is all to reinforce the picture that people value thier friends’ input over all else. Social networking has enabled an entirely new paradigm for garnering input from your friends. In fact, your ‘friends’ don’t even have to be people you have ever met! Read Robert Scoble’s beliefs about facebook friends for a look at why you can build your online friends network as a diverse rolodex, rather than a tight-knit circle of childhood friends. Facebook has an application called My Questions that allows you to post a question about anything that all your friends can see and answer, thus enabling nearly instantaneous feedback for any decision you might want to make. MySpace has Bulletins that allow for users to pull in opinions from all their friends, as well as having 3rd party services with embeddable polls if you want to get scientific in your opinion-getting. These are just primary services in the two largest social networks…beyond this there are networks, messageboards, review sites, wikis, and product review blogs/podcasts, etc.

But most of these allow you to get input if you know that you want an opinion; none of them reach out and try and tell you why you should/shouldn’t buy a product. For online advertising to be successful in the collegiate market, the advertising needs to turn everyday users into ‘e-vangelists’. If you have a product that will make people sit back and think, “Wow, this is really cool…and it actually benefits me somehow…hmm, maybe my friends will like it too!” you will have it made. This is how my circle of friends began using del.icio.us for sharing links and articles, it is how everyone started using facebook, and it is the same way that iPods became the most ubiquitous product you will see on any college campus in the country. It sort of seems that you need to have an awesome product before you can really leverage the benefits on social marketing…that is exactly the point. If your product is bad, don’t try and force the fit…you will be thrown out of the online community and spurned forever.

If your product isn’t getting the online buzz you think it deserves, jsut back up and figure out how to make it better: how can I make it so people get more functionality from this? How can I make it easier for people to share this product with thier friends? How can I leverage the existing community to provide relevant feedback about my product? Ask these questions, then try again. And again. And again. Stay out of the community…do not ever anonymously plug your own product in a messageboard or on a blog. If you need to comment on something (which I would suggest against), do it with full disclosure.

People care about what they read online and they will respond if they think a product is actually a good fit for them…or they’ll just do it because their friends told them to. Either way, it is good for you. Create a way for people to easily share your product/service with friends..the rest is viral.

I have come to find the ‘ripple’ metaphor to be a good tool in describing the overall effect that the online ’social revolution’ has had. When you drop even the smallest pebble into a body of water, it will cause an initial splash that greatly affects the water immediately around it, but then the actions of those close-proximity water molecules cause the molecules next to them to respond…do that a few thousand times and you get a ripple. As the ripple expands out into the body of water, it affects all the water it passes through, as well as anything that might be on the water’s surface. Eventually, the ripple hits the edge of the pond and bounces back…unless the body of water is so big that the ripple just fades out and disperses. Drop a few pebbles into a pond and you get overlapping ripples that cause all sorts of commotion and waves.

The metaphor paints the picture of various aspects of the external world affecting change throughout the college market. While you might be able to say that it could apply to new products and services dropped into the general market, I’m focusing on the collegiate side of things. The ripples in the collegiate market tend to be a lot stronger than in the general market because students are the most brand loyal, idealistic, impressionable, and forthcoming demographic in the marketing world. Ripples through a student population begin to overlap and get lost in one another, blurring the lines between students’ academic, personal, and business lives; for a student, everything is figuratively portable from one aspect of life to the next, because most do not work 9-5 and leave everything behind on a desk at work. A student takes their work home: a coffee table might be a multimedia work center or a textbook might be used more often as a coaster than as a learning device. In general, students are also willing to try out new things that might still have some bugs or other issues, thus making college students a prime launching pad for startup companies.

When this willingness for experimentation is combined with a general ‘follow-the-crowd’ mentality, you begin to see a place from where just about anything can emerge with minimal encouragement. If you have a product that can’t be successful in a college market, you probably are not ready for prime time yet. (Unless, of course, you have a product that is micro-targeted to a demographic outside the college age bracket).

The point of this extended metaphor is to set the stage for the rest of this series by illustrating how the student life is continually in flux, has no definite boundaries between its segments, and allows for testing or launching products in the most penetrable market on earth. This translates into a unique opportunity for a relatively small development to cause major shifts in a variety of areas such as marketing, social constructs, academic coordination, and external communication: all of which are subjects to be discussed in the coming weeks.

This is a big move that will certainly give facebook an edge on revenue viability in the social networking world, but the only thing I am left wondering is why it took so long.  Google revolutionized online ads a few years ago by making its advertisements non-intrusive and relevant to the user’s search query.  With a treasure trove of user data, facebook is a bit slow to get this new advertising platform to the market, but better late than never.  If you think about it, the data users provide on thier facebook profiles are truly a marketer’s dream…the more data you can compile on any group of people, the more accurately you can predict their behavior and cater to their specific needs.

The ability to user-target is already available on facebook for its user-created polls, which were launched on June 1, 2007.  Basically, any user can create a one question poll such as “What is your favorite kind of ice cream?” and then select what criteria the response sample needs to meet based on their listed interests, activities, gender, or school.  This results in amazingly relevant data because of its relatively high level of sophistication in targeting a sample population.  This idea expanded to advertising (currently only to be housed in the News Feed, but I see future expansion as a possibility) will greatly expand facebook;s ability to offer advertisers a relevant population to market their product to, which in turn means that facebook can generate more income per click and expand its client-base over time.

As long as Zuckerberg’s crew makes sure that they have a heavy-duty padlock on all user data and do not actually allow any outside access to it, I see this new platform as begin a huge success.  However, there is definitely the possibility that if this is handled incorrectly, there will be a user-revolt similar to the events following the launch of the News Feed…but I think facebook learned its lesson and will make sure it takes care of its own people first and focus on advertisers second.

Wired takes a look at 3 potential problems with the new platform.

ZDNet and the possible privacy implications.