Southwest Airlines’ Social Media #FAIL

When will people learn to stop biting the hand that feeds them ? Social media has been a veritable wellspring of opportunities for brands to build visibility, loyalty, engagement and generate revenue. But it can also be used to knock you down a peg or two when you make a mistake, and oh boy, did Southwest Airlines just make a big mistake.

A man tweeted this out when he received priority seating but his children did not and were not allowed to board with him: Wow, rudest agent in Denver. Kimberly S, gate c39, not happy @SWA.

According to AdWeek, the man and his two children were then asked by said agent to de-board the plane, at which point he was told to delete the tweet if he wanted to get back on the flight. He of course complied so he wouldn’t miss the flight, but the damage was already done.

What this agent was thinking is beyond me. She apparently said she felt threatened, which is hard to understand given that the man was on the flight with his children and no longer engaging with that agent, and there was no threatening language whatsoever in his tweet. More than likely she wanted the tweet removed so it wouldn’t be noticed by Southwest officials. At least, that’s my theory.

What she should have known was that once something is sent out into the Twittersphere, even if you delete it, it’s pretty much got a presence on the Internet for life in one shape or form. And what did she think this passenger was going to do once he landed at his destination? Not tweet out something even more damaging?

Now it’s time for Southwest officials to pile on and make matters worse. Ready? Here was their response to an inquiry from Mashable :

“A Southwest Airlines employee and customer were having a conversation about the airline’s family boarding procedures that escalated. The customer was removed from flight #2347 from DEN to MSP for a period of time to resolve the conversation outside of the aircraft and away from the other passengers.”

Nice try to make it sound as innocuous as possible, but a response like this has a distinct “let’s-sweep-it-under-the-rug” kind of feel to it when following this quote from the passenger’s six-year-old daughter.

“I like thought something bad was going to happen, like my dad being in jail,” she told reporters.

Ouch. Try as you might, most people are going to side with the six-year-old child worrying about her dad being sent to jail, especially families you want to book their next vacation flight through Southwest.

A bonehead move from an employee — whether the passenger was rude or not —compounded by a nonchalant response from the airline and a meager apology email to the man along with $50 vouchers for he and his two children (yes, $50), turned a relatively harmless tweet into a PR black eye.

The bottom line is that people have the right to use social media to complain about dissatisfying experience with brands just as much as they have the right to praise the good ones. You can’t start demanding that people remove tweets that you don’t like if they want to partake in your services.

We live in a world now where social media should be a part of any major brand’s employee training, even if their job has nothing directly to do with PR or marketing, because platforms like Twitter and Facebook have at the very least made it an indirect part of everyone’s job.

Southwest Airlines’ Social Media #FAIL