Why Jet Blue’s Apology Works

I am a JetBlue customer.  I am also a fan.  But, I admit that when the airline initially fumbled the customer service and public relations challenges that followed the snow/ice storm that whacked the East coat on Valentines Day (is it cliche to call it a ‘Valentines Day Massacre?’), I thought the airline was doomed.  You see it all the time — a company screws-up, the press jumps all over them, customers start gravitating to a competitor — and a few months later a little notice appears in the media saying that the company filed for bankrupty.

This won’t kill JetBlue.  In fact, I think the airline will come back even stronger than before and their response to this communications disaster will drive significant changes in the entire airline industry. 

What worked?  First, the very same issue that led to JetBlue’s troubles during the storm — their small size, and relatively thin management structure — played a key role in their recovery.  If JetBlue had acted like most companies and issued a press statement or used a PR firm to offer an apology to customers, it would have fallen flat.  When David Neeleman, JetBlue’s Founder and CEO, went on a personal apology tour through the media and talked directly to customers online (through the JetBlue website and even on YouTube) it came across as genuine, sincere, and personal.  Watch the video - it is obvious that Mr. Neeleman hasn’t slept in days, is taking the responsibility and stress of the crisis very personally.  Nobody wants the man to suffer, but it is nice to know that a CEO isn’t shielding himself from tough times when customers are up in arms.

Second, they took swift and decisive action.  Lots of companies promise to fix problems when a crisis hits.  Usually the investigation into what went wrong takes a few months.  Then a few more months pass before any real changes are announced.  The public forgets what really caused the problem and the impact that the changes a company makes are hardly noticeable.  Not at JetBlue — their new Customer Bill of Rights was issued within days of the crisis, while emotions were still high over the delays and inconveniences.  In today’s fast-moving media environment, where news travels very quickly and the attention-span of the average person is very short, JetBlue was able to put into place a plan for real change while their audience was still paying attention.

The way JetBlue responded to this crisis — in the media, to their customers, online, by making the necessary changes to their structure and policies quickly — probably saved the airline.  We all know that weather will always cause problems for airline companies.   But while I think we all gave up on most of the major airlines long ago when it comes to supporting us as customers when these situations hit, JetBlue has earned itself at least one more chance to prove that its model, and customer-focused philosophy, can and does work.  I think it does work and I look forward to flying JetBlue again (in March, I am heading down to Austin, TX — a direct flight from Boston!) so I can show my support.

Shut Up & Run the Ads

I wrote a post yesterday discussing the marketing efforts behind Shut Up & Sing, the new documentary about the Dixie Chicks and their criticism of President Bush.  You didn’t see it?  Nobody did.  My computer froze up and I lost the text before I was able to put it up online.  Too bad — when I wrote it yesterday morning, this was a small story and my analysis looked really solid.  Now its a big story and I am late to the conversation.  Alas.

So what are people talking about?

The documentary tracks the fallout that resulted after lead singer, Natalie Maines, said she was “ashamed” that President Bush was from Texas, the Chicks’ home state.  The comment prompted a boycott of the Chicks’ music by conservatives and opened up a discussion about freedom of speech among scholars and those in the music industry.  Time passed, things died down.  But now, the documentary has brought the controversy back to the fore — and with a new twist.

A handful of media venues have refused to run advertising promoting the movie.  The LA Times covered it yesterday.  There was a story on NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning.  And the Washington Post summed it up this way:

It all started earlier this week when Weinstein submitted ads for its new Barbara Kopple documentary “Shut Up & Sing” to the broadcast networks for review by their standards and practices departments.

NBC said it “cannot accept these spots as they are disparaging to President Bush.”

CW said it “does not have appropriate programming in which to schedule this spot.”

Weinstein said: “Eureka!”

And on Thursday evening, it sent out a news release headlined:

“In an Ironic Twist of Events, NBC and the CW Television Networks Refuse to Air Ads for Documentary Focusing on Freedom of Speech.”

“It’s a sad commentary about the level of fear in our society that a movie about a group of courageous entertainers who were blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech is now itself being blacklisted by corporate America,” bemoaned Weinstein Co. co-chairman Harvey Weinstein.

“The idea that anyone should be penalized for criticizing the president is sad and profoundly un-American,” he added.

As I see it, this hubub was not only anticipated by Harvey Weinstein and his team, it was a key part of their promotional strategy.  How else would you get coverage for a small-budget documentary film in today’s big-budget Hollywood movie promotion craziness?  We have a very tense election cycle coming to an end just two weeks from now, and a national media that is feasting on any criticism of the war, or the President, they can find.  All you had to do was light the fire. 

Of course, now the networks are in a no-win situation now — if they don’t run the ads, the press continues to cover the story (helping the movie gain traction, and the stations look selectively moral), and if they do run the ads, they look like they caved.  I think they should run the ads - networks would benefit greatly by becoming a part of the political dialogue and letting the population decide on its own.  Be fair, show ads promoting and criticizing the movie if that opportunity exists, but don’t limit one perspective from being heard because you are afraid of your audience.

Give credit to Weinstein and Co. for recognizing the opportunity to use the news cycle to promote their movie.  It is not a new strategy — MoveOn got into a similar fight with CBS around the Super Bowl a couple of years ago, and I have had clients whose online ads that venues have refused to run because of an arbitrary content standard.  In both cases press coverage resulted and the message ultimately got to the target audience. I don’t think it will work for any movie or event, but its a strategy that more organizations should understand and pursue.

Facebook’s About Face

Facebook dug a big hole for itself this past week when they enabled automatic news feeds on their members’ pages.  The news feeds were added to a subscriber’s homepage to keep them current on the activities of friends and groups.  In addition, the site also added what it calls “mini-feeds” to subscribers’ profiles.  Subscribers revolted, angry over what they considered an invasion of privacy, and Facebook was dragged through the headlines.

Well, Facebook got the message and immediately reversed course.  More importantly, they owned up to their mistake and apologize directly to their subscribers in an open letter on the Facebook website:

An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg:

We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now.

When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. I think a lot of the success we’ve seen is because of these basic principles.

We made the site so that all of our members are a part of smaller networks like schools, companies or regions, so you can only see the profiles of people who are in your networks and your friends. We did this to make sure you could share information with the people you care about. This is the same reason we have built extensive privacy settings – to give you even more control over who you share your information with.

Somehow we missed this point with News Feed and Mini-Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.

This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn’t made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. And I am also glad that News Feed highlighted all these groups so people could find them and share their opinions with each other as well.

About a week ago I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that’s what I believe in – helping people share information with the people they want to share it with. I’d encourage you to check it out to learn more about what guides those of us who make Facebook. Today (Friday, 9/8) at 4pm edt, I will be in that group with a bunch of people from Facebook, and we would love to discuss all of this with you. It would be great to see you there.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,

Mark

Everyone makes mistakes - and this one was a big one for Facebook.  But few realize or admit to making errors as quickly as Facebook did.  Besides being the right thing to do, Facebook’s very forthright apology and quick action was strategically smart.  Had they let the story drag on, who knows where it would have gone.  The media was trying to find an angle in the story so they could make the point that new media and social networks in particular were careless, or even dangerous.  Nope - Facebook knows that the most important people are their members and that’s whose trust they earned by acting the way they did.  All companies (and crisis specialists) should take notes.

Click/Counter-Click

Jason Heller, the managing director of Horizon Interactive and Paul DeBraccio, the CEO of Interevco squared off in a point/counter-point (or Click/Counter-Click as they call it) at Online Media Daily.  Their debate was on the blurring line between PR and marketing.  Here are some choice excerpts:

Heller: As time goes on and media consumption habits evolve, the lines between online media, marketing and PR are blurring en masse. Everything is media. The marketer is becoming more transparent. Your customers have never before been closer to your brand. Companies with multimedia assets are syndicating those assets as part of consumers’ media experience, as opposed to just being another message around it. Beyond your “standard” engaging ad units, marketers are creating content that can be used as a conduit for engagement and influence…

… Marketers must embrace some changes in the way they approach media. In order to do so, we must let go of some degree of control in order to embrace the changing landscape. One way to look at the trends in viral marketing is that the new digital channels have created a symbiotic relationship of sorts between the consumer and the marketer. Thus, marketers provide content that entertains and informs consumers, and consumers “repackage” the content and deliver it to other consumers in the form of sharing it and talking about it. Each of the parties benefit from the existence of the other.

DeBraccio: Allowing an advertiser to run a video or even a full length-program on our sites under the guise of entertainment may help with traffic and time spent on our sites, but I think this situation will spawn turf wars among publishers and advertisers…

…Giving up some control and allowing the message to become the ad, so to speak, is a nice utopian goal, but I am not sure the powers that be (i.e., money) will allow it.

The best argument that Paul DeBraccio can come up with is that the publishers and advertisers won’t allow a change in the rules of marketing and PR because it will hurt their bottom line.  Tough.  NOT making the change will do even more harm.  When will marketers understand that the audience is in control? If the audience won’t watch your ads, visit your website, or buy your products then you don’t have a job as a marketer.  Heller is right that ‘engagement and influence’ are better metrics for success in marketing  than measuing the impact of the system based on how happy the venues are.  If you achieve true engagement and influence, the product sales will follow, the advertising spend will increase, and everyone will ultimately get their fair share. 

One other thought: Marketers have always tried to simulate the experience that the consumer wants — you know, create the world they think the consumer would enjoy being a part of (this car makes me cooler, these jeans make me look sexier, this sports drink makes me run faster, etc.).  I believe the willing suspension of disbelief by the consumer that has driven traditional marketing is being replaced by a pursuit of the truth.  Marketers have to create real experiences for consumers, ones they can touch and feel and live in on their own terms.  Consumers want to see, and experience, what life will be like if they buy a product.  And if the experience is not real then the consumer will find one that is, and buy that product.