Unless you’ve been pretty sheltered this week, you’ve probably heard about the Kevin Smith/Southwest Air run in that rang out around the world in media stories and people buzzing with phrases like TTTF (too fat to fly). The director and actor said a pilot ejected him from a Southwest Airlines flight from Oakland to Burbank, saying he didn’t fit properly in a single seat. Smith turned to Twitter, then his SModcast and his blog.  Southwest apologizes (sort of). Not good enough. Then Southwest tries again.

Aside from the fact that  the media can’t seem to get enough of another corporation caught short by the outraged tweeting masses, this should be yet another wake up call of the speed by which screw ups travel and escalate today.

As an instant viral publishing tool, Twitter is often the first place we hear a rumble of something big — where news (or rumors) break — so it’s followed closely followed by the mainstream media that then “vets” the info. This summer I was in a store in Tahoe when someone in the store read a tweet that Michael Jackson had died. We all headed for a TV or went to CNN on our phones to verify the info. Not everything trending on Twitter is accurate — remember Goldblum?

Bad personal experiences for people we like at the hands of corporations is David and Goliath stuff. And we consumers love those stories. We love to rant about injustice. We can’t get enough of it.

Twitter is the early warning siren and reaches well beyond those actively engaged on Twitter — it is closely followed by the media and bloggers and it can explode the customer complaint horror stories many times faster than what companies previously suffered just at the hands of a few irate bloggers (remember Dell, Kryptonite) to potentially devastating effect.

Southwest is a company that has been active and strong in the social space. They’ve handled difficult situations well.  But they’re not immune. They just found out what happens when you piss off a guy with a rabid fanbase and a Twitter account with 1.6M followers. Smith has a nimble intellect and savage wit and his tweets and SModcasts are entertaining.  One of his tweets had me laughing out loud:  “You [messed] with the wrong sedentary processed-foods eater!” But chances are Southwest didn’t enjoy this exchange as much as the rest of us.

If the arbitrary nature of this online customer movement seems unfair, too bad.  Get used to it. The genie is not going back in the bottle.

How companies succeed in the future will depend on how they embrace and navigate this new socially-empowered customer culture. The answers don’t lie in merely having a company Twitter account. And they definitely can’t be solved purely through social media monitoring. These are just tools. Tools that let you listen. And respond. The key is what a company learns from the listening, how it applies those learnings and then how it communicates those learnings to its customers that will rescue its reputation and make it a stronger company.

For Smith, the publicity may be a windfall given his new movie “Cop Out,” opens in theaters Feb. 26.

The opening ceremonies of the Vancouver Olympics drew the largest number of viewers ever for any non-U.S. hosted Winter Olympics in history. NBC pulled an average 32.6 millions from 7pm to 11pm, according to Nielsen.  That number was a 47% increase over the 2006 Winter Olympics, when 22.2 million watched the opening ceremonies in Turin.

Despite some expectations that NBC would pull low ratings for the Olympic Games – NBC has pulled an average of 28.6 million viewers each night for the first three nights – 25% higher than the 22.9 million who watched Turin games in 2006.

Also sadly boosting viewership was the tragedy of Georgian luge racer Nodar Kumaritashvili.  NBC aired the footage from the crash once during the Nightly News and again before the start of the Opening Ceremony. 

RFM is a behavioral marketing segmentation technique that direct marketers have been using for years to identify their best customers in order send them special, tailored offers. Read More

Did you know that marketers are now going as far as to actually create Television shows just so they can feature/”pimp” their products.  Marketers will do anything to stay one step ahead in this increasingly competitive environment, but at what cost? Read More

You can compromise your brand and try to appeal to everyone, which only creates a cloudy brand promise and hides your story. Don’t be afraid to appeal to a specific audience. You will be noticed and win more hearts in the end.

When you launch an online campaign, try and make sure that you can run it for at least one-month (at a minimum) in order to get maximum effectiveness. This is true with both SEM and display campaigns. Read More

Today, Belgium’s ad agencies started a one-week virtual strike to protest the way clients conduct pitches in their country. So far, almost 20 agencies have closed their websites except for displaying one paragraph each of an open letter to clients that runs across their home pages, from one agency’s site to the next (lowe.be). Read More

Recently Google announced a new feature in Google Reader that lets you create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don’t have their own feed. Read More

Take this bit of trivia knowledge down all you aspiring game show contestants out there.

This past Sunday, Super Bowl XLIV managed to break all records and surpass M*A*S*H* as the most watched television show in history.  Viewership for the Super Bowl came in at 106.5 million, up from 98.7 million viewers last year.  The series finale of  M*A*S*H* previously held this title since 1983 bringing in 105.97 million viewers.

Sunday’s Super Bowl also had the most ad time in history. At 47 minutes and 50 seconds of ads, it beat last year’s Super Bowl ad tally of 44:50. Forty-one companies advertised, buying a total of 66 spots (excluding ads aired by the NFL and by CBS).

Anheuser-Busch was once again the top advertiser, with nine spots, followed by Hyundai with four. Dot-coms held the top ad category, with 5:45 seconds of ad time from eight different companies. Automakers and beer companies were the next top advertising category, tying at 5:30.

CBS acknowledged that it was attempting to get more inventory out of the game in part because of an influx of late advertising inquiries. One way it did this was by selling a number of :15 spots. The game included seven such spots, compared to none in the Super Bowl last year.

Two of the best-rated individual TV markets were the markets of the two teams in the game:  New Orleans and Indianapolis.  New Orleans earned top market share overall with Indianapolis coming in fourth place.  Washington, D. C came in second and Nashville was in third place.  Nielsen says a major winter storm in D. C. kept viewers in their homes, which pushed up viewership.

A design that is to be appealing must also be easy on the eyes. Without the right amount of white space, text would be unreadable, graphics would lose their emphasis, and there would be no balance between the elements on a page.

Read More