The media — new and old — have been all over the JetBlue story for the last week, so I won’t rehash it all here. Short story: bad snowstorm in Northeast, JetBlue stunningly fails to meet passenger expectations, but does a pretty decent job of actually apologizing afterwards (how refreshing is that), including a YouTube video by founder and CEO David Neeleman, a JetBlue Customer Bill of Rights, emails to customers and frequent fliers (I got one) and full page apologies in the newspapers.
Commentary: Shel Holtz, Todd Defren, BL Ochman, Mack Collier, Tom Biro, Chip Griffin, Peter Himler, JetBlue on Technorati.
I’ll join with my pr and marketing colleagues in giving props to the company for effectively using social media in its crisis communications.
Marketing diva Toby Bloomberg asks the follow-on question: if JetBlue had had a social media marketing strategy before the crisis, would it have made a difference? My opinion: it might have alleviated some of the frustration had there been additional channels of communication for stranded passengers, like an RSS feed with information on cancelled flights, but the flaws in the JetBlue infrastructure that caused the situation would not have been fixed with better communication about them.
What really makes a difference isn’t the media we use. It is the "social" part — caring about your customers, delivering on the promises you make, and when you fall down, for whatever reason, doing what it takes to make it right.
Sure, social media — blogs, YouTube, email and so forth — help us respond and communicate faster. But one of the best examples of crisis communications of all time happened well before the Internet – Johnson & Johnson and the Tylenol scare in 1982.
J&J sincerely cared about its customers. It stepped up and did all the right things. Which is why confidence in the product, and market share, rebounded pretty quickly.
To its credit, JetBlue seems to understand this. Neeleman was clearly sincere in his promise to never let this happen again, and because the airline DOES have a pretty good reputation, by and large we believe him. He’s also putting his money where his mouth is; costs to reimburse affected passengers and prevent future problems will run the airline $20-30 million.
Of course, it is not what you say or how you say it. It’s what you do.
Customers don’t want empty promises. They want to see the company live up to them. JetBlue has done a decent job in responding to this crisis, and gets full credit for using all the media tools available to it. Now, we’ll be watching to see if it follows through. My bet is that it will.
Tags: JetBlue, social media, David Neeleman, crisis management
