Southwest Airlines and an Unhappy Passenger with access to Social Media

In 2010 the crew of a Southwest Airlines flight between the California cities of Oakland and Burbank asked a passenger to leave the plane before takeoff because it deemed him too overweight to fly. Unfortunately, that passenger was “Clerks” and “Chasing Amy” director Kevin Smith, who has more than 1.5 million Twitter followers and was willing to make sure that they all heard all about it.

A Southwest disaster was in the making.

"Dear @SouthwestAir - I know I'm fat, but was Captain Leysath really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated?" Smith asked in a heavily quoted tweet.

Gossip powerhouse TMZ picked up the story. Southwest, which also has more than a million Twitter followers, quickly posted an apology and admitting that the situation was poorly handled, to which Smith--who says he was seated with his seat belt buckled and both armrests down—wrote a rebuttal.

This may be the best example we've seen yet of how Twitter and other forms of new-media mass communication are shaping that old industry known as public relations.

The Lesson: PR and customer service are two different divisions of a company. But this incident shows how, in the Digital Age, the two are increasingly overlapping. With Twitter, many companies are conducting customer relations in the public eye, and a company's response to a high-profile disgruntled customer may require dispatching the PR team. Good communication between the two is obviously key.