Amidst the raging debate about curbside baggage checks, airline fees and restrictions against tipping sky caps, I jokingly asked Southwest Airlines on Twitter whether I would now have to pay the airline for the bags under my eyes. Here is their response:

This is exceptional, because it means that Southwest is actually staffing their Twitter account with live people, and they have the freedom to have a little fun. Go ahead and leave a comment about how awful airlines are at customer service, but since when have you been able not only to “talk” to an airline, but actually reach a real person with a sense of humor?

Tags: Southwest Airlines, Twitter, baggage

Twitter is taking some heat this week for its alleged mishandling of accusations by Ariel Waldman that she was being stalked and harassed on Twitter, and that the popular site “refuses to uphold its terms of service.” (You can read the details of Ariel’s situation on her blog.)

According to the blog post, Ariel had an ongoing “dialogue” with Twitter dating back to 2007 concerning her allegations of inappropriate conduct by another Twitter user. She says “in 2008 it (the harassment) escalated to a level that could no longer be ignored,” and on March 14, she contacted Twitter asking for a resolution. She did not get a reply for three days, and she did not find it satisfactory. In later correspondence on April 9, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Ariel:

“Ariel,

Apologies for the delay here. We’ve reviewed the matter and decided it’s not in our best interest to get involved. We’ve tasked our lawyers with a full review and update of our TOS.

Thank you for your patience and understanding and good luck with resolving the problem.

Best,
Jack.”

Ariel also posted her experience on Get Satisfaction, a site that enables consumers/users to engage directly with company representatives when they feel they have received bad customer service, or that a company has broken a promise, or violated an agreement.

Some questions pop up right away. What could Twitter have done better in its early conversations with Ariel to keep this situation from becoming a public embarrassment? Whether Twitter “bungled” this situation is unclear, but it is equally unclear that they handled it correctly.

Jack’s email above is dismissive. He offers no explanation for the decision. His recognition that Ariel is upset with this matter, and that he sympathizes, is less than superficial. Obviously he was advised by his lawyers to say very little. Had he had good communications counsel, he could have balanced the legal advice with some openness and authenticity, which would have been a very Web 2.0 thing to do. Instead, he comes across like a tobacco company CEO.

Bad communications counsel, or no communications counsel at all, will eventually lead to mistakes that will damage a company’s reputation. Most of these mistakes are avoidable, unless you’re too arrogant or too cool to seek professional advice. A public relations professional would have told Twitter’s executive management:

• Consider every negative customer interaction as an opportunity to build trust and rapport with your customers
• Be prepared that every bit of correspondence of any nature will become a matter of public record. Conduct yourself in all dealings as if you are writing for public consumption, and your communications will be more thoughtful and more strategic. (And they’ll make you look better when they are reproduced on a blog or on the front page of the morning paper.)
• Investigate allegations quickly, render a decision, and communicate that decision and its rationale clearly
• Respond to the aggrieved party with more than a cursory legal notice. Show some sympathy.

This situation is reminiscent of Facebook’s 2007 Beacon debacle, when consumers and privacy advocates railed against the company’s advertising platform, which shared private user information with third party sites, seemingly without the user’s consent. Facebook dragged its feet with a response, and even two weeks after the first public criticism, according to BusinessWeek, “a spokesperson for the site declined to elaborate on the information, stating, ‘Facebook is listening to feedback from its users and committed to evolving Beacon.’”

Anyone who watched the Mark Zuckerberg vs. Sarah Lacy title bout at this year’s South by Southwest knows that Zuckerberg is not a professional communicator. But it’s the obligation of a CEO to know how to communicate. Jack Welch knows how. Steve Jobs knows how. John Chambers knows how. But if you’re a Web 2.0 CEO, apparently it’s uncool.

For a Web 2.0 company, Facebook has done an awful job engaging users in genuine dialogue. I wrote last year about the company’s awful blog, which I called “little more than a marketing blog.” It was not hard to see then that the company clearly did not get it when it came to authentic user engagement, so I was not surprised when they mishandled the Beacon situation.

So did Twitter’s leadership seek other than legal advice on handling this incident? Not exactly. In fact, in a blog post Saturday, they boasted, “We do not employ public relations professionals. This accusation caught us by surprise.” No kidding on both counts. It’s highly speculative on my part to assume that such counsel would have been contrary to the course Twitter actually took, or, that having received such counsel, Twitter executives would have chosen to follow it. (Yeah, they’re executives. Sorry.)

Mindless rejection of the value of public relations counsel by the Web 2.0 illuminati is just that. It’s mindless and potentially damaging to a company’s reputation. I would argue that Facebook, from a reputation standpoint, has not fully recovered from the Beacon backlash.

There are many notions underlying the predictions that PR is a dying industry. One of these is that PR is spin, that it is inauthentic, that it is contradictory to transparency and authenticity. A good PR person won’t “put words in the mouth” of an executive, but might be able to step back and look at the broader communications landscape and offer some advice. What if, instead of sending a CEO e-mail drafted by the legal department and hoping the situation would go away like an annoying rash, someone inside Twitter had said, “Do you really want people to think that strict enforcement of the TOS is our only concern? Ariel Waldman is an influential blogger, and she would be a good ally. She’s knowledgeable about this. Let’s invite her in for a conversation.”

Tags: arial waldman, beacon, Facebook, jack dorsey, mark zuckeberg, PR, Public Relations, sarah lacy, terms of service, tos, Twitter

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh this evening used Twitter to deny charges made in a press release issued today by competitor Discount Shoe Warehouse (DSW) that Zappos had attempted to mislead consumers with unfair use of DSW store images and “service marks.”

Hsieh said, in response to DSW’s allegations, “Obviously Zappos would never intentionally do that.” He also said Zappos had not been contacted by DSW in relation to the claims, and the Zappos legal team had only became aware of the claims through the DSW press release.

According to the release, “the name DSW was being used (by Zappos) in multiple URLs, along with DSW store photographs, in an effort to mislead consumers into believing they were on a DSW related website. The site then links customers to the Zappos.com site.” The release says DSW “intend(s) to rigorously defend and protect our intellectual property and our brand against any sort of misuse,” and says DSW has therefore filed a suit in federal district court alleging that Zappos has infringed DSW service marks.

It was only a matter of time before a company’s commitment to transparency and openness on Twitter was put to the test, and it happened tonight to Zappos. Zappos certainly “slowed the bleeding” caused by the announcement, and it is impressive that Hsieh “stepped up” and talked openly about the situation. In the lightning fast social media age, what could be faster and more credible than getting onto Twitter with a quick announcement?

It may be morning before Zappos issues an official response. In the meantime, this quick response strategy allows Hsieh and Zappos to regain some control of the communications agenda after allegedly being blindsided by DSW.

Nice work, Tony.

Tags: tony, hsieh, zappos, dsw, discount shoe world, allegations, lawsuit, twitter

Speculation in Twitter IDs, aka handles, has begun. I spotted an auction on eBay for the Twitter ID @powerseller. I’ve been wondering for about a year now whether Twitter “handle” speculation would become popular in the same way as domain name speculation, with people securing Twitter IDs hoping they have resale value.

This strategy is going to have the same effects as domain name speculation:

• Like domains, the best Twitter IDs for many businesses will be held by speculators who have an inflated, dot-com boom notion of their worth, forcing smaller companies to adopt “workaround” IDs with hyphens or extra words in them.
• Large corporations will crush speculators who attempt to hold online IDs that are part of an established, valuable corporate brand. For example, someone has already registered @mcdonalds on Twitter. This could be the harbinger of a Twitter presence for McDonald’s, or is more likely a speculator. You can bet if it is the latter, McDonald’s will crush the current holder of the ID if he/she does not surrender it willingly, should McDonald’s decide it wants it.
• There have been many instances of people securing Twitter handles and posing as someone else. This is easy, given Twitter’s lightweight registration process, and its loosely written Terms of Service, which bans impersonation, and lack of enforcement on this point. (See for example @billgates or @sethgodin, ersatz celebrities on Twitter.)
• Ultimately, Twitter handles probably belong to Twitter, and there may be some disappointments ahead for speculators.

@andrewbaron ’s recent eBay auction of his Twitter ID and followers does not really come under this heading, but is interesting for what we can observe from it - there is a market for Twitter presence in whatever form. The auction went past $1500 before Baron canceled it.

My assumption is that if eBay decided to have a Twitter presence for its PowerSeller program, and felt @powerseller was the best ID for this purpose, they would simply take it from whomever currently holds it.

While eBay may consider PowerSeller a trade mark, or copyrighted reference, it has allowed independent use of the PowerSeller name, so there are certainly possibilities for building a legitimate business with the ID. If someone purchases the ID, and uses it to build a genuine eBay PowerSeller community on Twitter, then not only does that have general value, but eBay might want to just leave it alone and be grateful that its PowerSeller program has so many passionate and engaged participants.

I do advise clients who become aware of grassroots community efforts, rather than seeing these as threatening, to instead monitor the conversations, and join in if the forum is genuine and constructive. This is a separate topic, but it’s part of the whole dynamic of what happens when private individuals co-opt, for whatever reason, bits and pieces of a corporation’s identity.

The larger issue with this is the erosion of trust in Twitter as a social network. Before it was revealed that @sethgodin was not Seth Godin (the ruse was carried out very effectively), people were thrilled that Seth had a presence on Twitter. The Twitter Turing test is an easy one. In Godin’s case, what easily passed as “authentic, transparent 1:1 conversation” was completely inauthentic, and for a time, the deception was undetectable.

If there is a question, then community policing of Twitter-based deception and co-opting of brands and company names is not a sustainable answer. Twitter may want to adopt a commercial ID registration process in which holders of these handles certify ownership of the brand name, product name, etc.

If, on the other hand, you support free reign in the assignment and use of brand-like Twitter names, then you should expect that the “information” offered by these users could be completely worthless. What if toshibaflatscreen tells you it offers 1080p resolution, and you buy it, and find it doesn’t? Who do you hold responsible? For this reason alone, it’s unlikely that in the long term, large companies will tolerate any abuses of their brand and company names.

Tags: twitter, domain name, handle, speculation, powerseller, @andrewbaron, ebay

The past week has seen atrocious performance from Twitter, and cute as it is, I for one have seen this screen message far too often for my tastes.

Given how hard it has been lately to get out 140 characters of text, a seemingly simple, low IT overhead task, my love for our much maligned old friend e-mail has grown, and I have been driven to Facebook, Flickr, Brightkite and elsewhere in my attempts to stay connected.

To remind myself of why Twitter is so great, and why we have declared the death of e-mail, I jotted down the differences between the two.

Twitter

• Limited to 140 characters
• Unformatted ASCII only with some special characters
• Text and URLs only
• Adding single recipients somewhat “automated;” multiple recipients must be manually entered
• Few sending options — reply and single recipient direct message

E-mail

• No character limit
• Most clients support full text formatting, styles, fonts, colors, alignment, bulleted lists, etc.
• Text, URLs, images, attachments
• All recipients may be automated from address book
• Numerous sending options (reply, reply to all, cc, Bcc, forward)

Now factor how unreliable Twitter has become, and you have to wonder, “why you got to be hating on e-mail so much?” Of course I am being a bit facetious. A direct comparison of the two is unfair and not all that useful. But you do have to question what happens to the appeal of Twitter when its operation becomes so difficult and unpredictable. The Twitter metaphor only works if the tool is available 99.999 per cent of the time.

Tags: twitter, poor performance, email, comparison