Alaska Airlines PR problems
December 29, 2005
Jeremy Hermanns’ adventures in a holed Alaska Airlines flight are all over the blogosphere right now and barely need repeated here. Interesting though that almost as many screen inches are now being dedicated to speculation on the source of vituperative comments on his blog.
Hermanns has tracked the IP address of some of the more ridiculous contributions to none other than Alaska Airlines (though he does play fair and say they might come from hackers using an Alaska Airlines address).
I am with Jeremy Pepper on this. If these comments really came from Alaska, I doubt if they originated from the PR department. (David Parmet isn’t so sure).
Jeremy sees the need for a comment section as part of an overall company blogging policy. My solution is to treat blogs like any other media when it comes to unofficial comments.
If your company is big enough and ugly enough to need a policy which specifically prevents employees from talking directly to the press (without prior clearance from the communications dept) then the same goes for blogs.
Treat blogs as internationally published media. And require your employees to get clearance before they talk about your company or anything to do with the company, even anonymously. Otherwise, they face disciplinary procedures.
Now the ball is in Alaska’s court to track down the commenters, take action and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Of course the same could be said about the hole in their aircraft.
Update: Robert Scoble makes a good point. Alaska Airlines should already have been knee-deep in the conversation:
…if Alaska had a few “real” blogs of their own, we’d be able to see what “real” employees think about this kind of behavior and they might have been able to head this off. Instead, it’s just growing and growing (and getting worse cause Alaska doesn’t seem like they are doing anything about it).
Technorati Tags: AlaskaAirlines, Hermanns, flight#536, travelpr, travel, reputationmanagement