post by Stephanie Nelson
A couple of weeks ago, I was scheduled to fly to southern California to visit my husband’s family. As my inordinately bad luck would have it, the night before our flight was the night the DFW airport was struck by a tornado. And where was our connection through? That’s right…DFW.
At the suggestion of local weatherman and Twitter superstar, Brad Panovich, my husband called to find out if our flight was affected. Sure enough, it had been cancelled. After my husband sat on hold for another half an hour without getting any further, I tweeted my displeasure with the whole situation, using the American Airlines twitter handle in the tweet.
Within 5 minutes, I got a response saying to DM the American Airlines twitter team if they could be of any help. This was not what I was expecting! Any sort of response from a large company, much less one coming that quickly took me off-guard!
I sent a DM explaining our situation. Over the course of the next couple hours (more due to my walking away from Twitter for a bit than a lack of response from American Airlines, for the record), we got our flights rescheduled and set our vacation back on the right course.
As someone that works day-in and day-out in social media, this type of “success story” makes my heart leap! To see first hand a company “getting it” like this and putting resources towards making social a viable part of its customer service/relations validates my career choice and my business choice in a way. Now if we could just make ALL companies understand. I guess that’ll just have to be another goal for SBN Marketing…