Rational Survivability

Off Topic: Southwest Airlines Monitoring Twitter For Customer Service/Brand Protection

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

My Southwest Airlines flight from New Hampshire to Philly yesterday sucked the big one.  Flying into Philly is always a gamble but yesterday I went all in and flew SWA for the first time instead of US Scareways.

My flight was supposed to take off at 5:20 PM.  It actually took off at around 7:45 PM.  Due to "weather," once we arrived over PHL airspace, those of us in the bovine express class then endured 30 minutes of low-earth orbit in a holding pattern awaiting vector approach clearance to land once we got there.

Upon landing, we waited almost 30 minutes for our luggage only to find that they had to go back for a second load since the first wasn't large enough of a sweep to claim them all.  The baggage came...and went.  Mine wasn't amongst them.  It was now 10:30pm.  At this point, one of my VP's who was also traveling to the same locale wisely left.  Cue the violins.

I filed a claim next to a woman who was going apeshit over her drenched and soiled suitcases.  The migrant baggage helper person said that another flight was due in shortly (about 45 minutes) and I could wait to see if it was on that flight.  I made some remark about pitching a pup tent in baggage claim.  I could hear crickets chirping...

This was all friendly and helpful enough.  There was no reason to get medieval as the poor souls behind the counter can't even track bags to tell if they landed -- or so they say.  Upon filing my claim, I asked that my bag just be returned to NH or delivered to my hotel given the fact that I was staying only one night before returning home.  They would try the latter as the last run to "local" hotels was around midnight.

I was prepared for the old fake-finger-teeth-brushing and washcloth-the-armpits routine to get me through my meeting if need be.  Wow.

It was now almost 11pm.  I still had to collect my rental car and drive 45 minutes to my hotel.

As I was walking out, I saw a strange man return my bag to the carousel. I reckoned that if he took it, loaded it with explosives and put it back, that hopefully I would suffer a quick death.  No such luck.

I picked it up and wrung it out.  It was soaked.

I shrugged it off, got the rental and got to my hotel in one piece.

Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking. Just a moment...

Of course I twittered the entire experience with my normal (lack of) withholding.  I didn't address the tweet to @southwestair or anything, but I obviously mentioned them by name.

This morning I was quite amazed to see that someone (not something) from Southwest was monitoring Twitter feeds and responded to me.  I can tell it isn't a bot because of the responses to the rather colloquial nature of some of my tweets.  Check it out:

The plea to let them try again to earn my loyalty and prove that "Southwest=Awesomeness" came from a statement that "Southwest=Suckage."  ;)

It's pretty interesting that they have people monitoring Twitter for brand/reputation purposes -- it comes across as a customer service effort, also.   I know it's not as profound as some of the remarkable Twitter stories of late, but it was cool.

Cool and frightening at the same time.  So, thanks for the attention, SWA.  We'll see how you do on my return flight today.

Anyone else have an experience such as this?

/Hoff

Update: The flight back was great.  It arrived early, to boot.  I have to say that my Southwest Twitter experience wasn't just a single fire and forget incident as "they" twittered back again to check up on me:

;)

I'm a Twit(terer) but did you know that the L.A. Fire Department is, too?

If you look over to the right under the Lijit widget, you'll see that I use Twitter.  It's addictive.  At first I thought it was stupid.  Now I'm having simplex "conversations" with myself and others(?) that are strangely satisfying.

If you don't happen to know what Twitter is, it's basically a "micro-blogging" (ugh) social-networking site.  Read more about it here.

If you were so inclined, you can feel free to bore yourself to tears by tapping into the ever-exciting neartime log of my activities -- only to discover that all I do is eat and sit in airports.  Thrilling.

However, as I was browsing the Twitter site today, I found that the L.A. Fire Department actually logs (all?) its calls to Twitter -- it's the web-based version of sitting in front of a scanner and listening to dispatch.  They also maintain a blog.  Imagine if the LAPD did the same...now that would be "fun."

Scoble covered this back in July and unfortunately I didn't happen to see it at the time. 

This got me thinking about not only how interesting this is to those whose hobby in the analog world is following the LAFD's actions and this obviously unique particular application for information dispersal and broadcast of information from and to these first responders as an alert/emergency service, but also that of potential applications in the DoD space.

I'm readying another post regarding some of the impacts that Web2.x and various collaboration and interactive technologies have had on the modern warfighter, but thus really struck me as interesting. 

With some of the various visualization tools coming to bear (Twitter is introducing one) one could take human-generated as well as automated feeds of unstructured, yet contextual theater updates (in addition to more structured data such as engagement, position, movement, number, etc.) and parse/visualize activity over time to arrive at some very interesting data points.  More on that later, but noddle on it.

Back to the LAFD's Twitter and why I'm bringing this up on my "security" blog...while it appears that these logs are public record, check out the information you can glean from these entries -- they appear to be unparsed.  Is anyone else concerned by the privacy implications of including personal information as part of these feeds...esp. when paired with the types of activities profiled in the abstracts?

/Hoff