Brian Feener

American airlines stranded over 300,000 passengers over the past week.

At this point, what hotel compensation, free flight, or complimentary first class upgrade is going to solve the problem of people not trusting the airline?

Were I running American Airlines, the first thing I would do as a pro-active response to the crisis would be to identify what we can do to show that we actually care for them.  (This is different than just simply caring for their well-being.)  What can we do to show that our process and procedure is designed to meet the customer needs?  Do they just want a sorry?

No, the company can never give back the time that these people lost, but let’s find resources that we CAN replace and do so 100%.  Then go beyond that.

On the record, I do not think that American Airlines is going to be able to recover from this in the short term.  This company is going to succeed or fail based on the strategy they have in the next 30 days.

The internet is big and getting bigger. These numbers blew my mind when I first read them:

March Wrap-up (from: The Official WordPress blog)

• 298,194 blogs were created.
• 381,855 new users joined.
• 2,242,997 file uploads.
• 3,225,059 posts and 1,420,975 new pages.
• 5,622,696 comments.
• 4,418,407 logins.
• 636,024,114 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 347,679,330 on self-hosted blogs. (983,703,444 pageviews total across blogs we know about.)
• 863,470 active blogs, where “active” means they got a human visitor.

Nearly 300,000 new blogs were created and they wrote over 4 million new pieces of content (pages + posts).

Were they all worth reading? Heck no. There’s no way each one is offering insight.

Were some worth reading? Heck yeah! There are some hard working folks out there, thinking about the same things that you think about, writing about the same things you’re interested in, and posting about the topics that you are researching.

How do you keep track of it all?

You can bookmark the sites. Constantly check to see whether the sites are updated. And keep checking and checking and checking… or, you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

What is an RSS feed?

Here’s a video from leelefever.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU]

It is great for business because if you have interesting content, people will want to read it. It’s great for your customers because you are pushing the content to them, rather than requiring them to pull it.

The key here, for businesses, is to understand that this is just as personal as anything else you do. People who go to blogs expect a human voice to come across in the writing. It’s ok to use the occasional internet meme. It’s ok to post a funny video. You can even just post “stuff” if it’s relevant to your overall brand, like Jason does.

Then, when you do have something important to say, you have a built-in audience.

No one says that you have to do it this way, it just tends to work.

After you launch a product, what’s your mind-set?

Do you think “Whew!  Done.”

Or - “Whew! Time to start over.”

After launch, it’s time to get into the minutae of the product that you may not have had time for before.  What ways can you make the product easier?  How can you make that 6-step process 5 steps?  4 steps?

Is the font the right font for the product?

How do the images make you feel?

When you’re done, it’s really time to get started.