Hot on the heels of my Winning Airline Twitter Strategies post is a story hot off the Twitter feed.
Normally a complaint regarding an airline's overweight policy wouldn't really get much traction on Twitter, but when that passenger is Kevin Smith, actor, director and Tweeter with 1.6 million followers, then you've got a veritable Twitter war of words.
This is the kind of social media firestorm that every marketing manager dreads.
It seems the issue started when Smith was told he had to leave the plane because he is over-sized.
That resulted in a number of other tweets that describe the situation from Smith's point of view.
Smith goes on a bit of rant (justified or not) about the way he feels he was treated by Southwest during the incident. From the tweets, it appears that he got on to another Southwest flight without incident but because he was already in a bad mood, he continued to comment.
So now that the Southwest brand has been frontally assaulted on Twitter, what are the poor people behind the @southwestair twitter account to do? Well, what would you do if Smith came up to your counter and yelled at you?
In my opinion, @southwestair 's response to the @kevinsmith comments on Twitter were timely and appropriate.
Will the way that @southwestair dealt with the situation on Twitter mitigate the potential damage caused by Smith's tirade? That remains to be seen.
The oversized passenger debate is current, hot, and highly controversial. Smith's incident on Southwest is probably not a singular event and there are probably many other passengers on many other airlines that have had similar experiences.
Whether he chose to or not, Smith is now a very vocal spokesperson for oversized passengers. Unfortunately, it happened on Southwest and in front of over a million followers.