The Brilliance of Southwest

When watching the yearly installation of March Madness, CEOs of all the major airlines not named Southwest must be furious.  Nearly every commercial break during the games features an advertisement touting Southwest's baggage policy.  In fact, most Southwest ads feature ridicule of other airlines.  I fly almost exclusively on Southwest.  Make no mistake - it's not perfect.  Sometimes flights are late.  Sometimes you have to too much taxiing, or to wait a while for a gate assignment.  The difference between Southwest and the rest is clear:  Southwest makes it a bit easier to deal with the stressful travel day by being cordial, helpful, and by performing their jobs professionally and with a smile.  Because of this advantage, Southwest can charge a little more than the bargain carriers, and not charge for baggage.

The CEOs of United, American, et al. can only be furious at themselves.  Jena and I were talking about how the show 'Undercover Boss' (which we love by the way) should feature a CEO of an airline, but then we joked that they would have to shut down the entire operation after all employees in the airport were fired by the undercover boss for being surly, unpleasant, and incompetent.

An example of the rank ineptitude:  'The Rest' has employed a baggage fee policy that encourages people to cram all their stuff into oversized baggage that they attempt, usually unsuccessfully, to cram into an overhead bin.  After being berated by the rude airplane staff (who let them on the plane with the large bag in the first place), the thrifty passengers are allowed to check their bags FOR FREE.  Now the people who played by the rules are mad because they had to pay and the people who cheated didn't.  The people who didn't pay aren't happy because they have been treated rudely by the flight attendants.  All of the people are wondering why they didn't fly another airline, like...hmmm...Southwest maybe?

Lesson to any managers of any company, any size, any industry, any location:  there is no excuse for rude, unprofessional behavior, no matter how hard or stressful your job may be.  If this behavior is tolerated, then it becomes accepted practice, and all of a sudden a few years pass by and you can't watch basketball without your company being made fun of by a company that never accepted that sort of behavior.

Social InterWeb 2.0

DISCLAIMER: This stuff seems really cool and profound to me, but I may be talking about things that are pretty inane and problems that have already been solved, so forgive me if this post is really stupid.

Well, it's almost here. In a little over a week, I will be fully immersed in the social web. As someone who isn't probably the hippest dude when it comes to the new Internet, I have some boning up to do on how people use the web, what makes a site both 'cool' and (more importantly in my humble opinion) 'useful'. I see (younger) people today who route almost all their interaction through some form of social web component. I usually think in terms of just emailing my buddy, or *gasp*, calling them to see what they are up to next weekend. For that matter, my buddy was someone who I had known for a while, or at the very least, had actually met. Now there is whole dynamic whereby you can have 'friends' who you have no interaction with outside of 'poking' or posts on a wall, or a comment in a myspace page. This is all weird, but this is what I need to start to grasp.

See, I am the guy who doesn't answer his cell phone half the time that it rings. It's a tool of my convenience, not a direct line to me wherever I may be. I have IM, but I don't have a big friend list. I have a myspace page, but it has the same 51 friends that it had after about 2 wks of having the page. I have a facebook page that I put up to do development, and something like 9 people found it and did friend requests. I have one post on my 'wall' (thanks Zahra!).

I do participate in the social web - I provide recommendations, feedback, and ratings about things that I have done, places I have visited, books I have read, music I have listened to. I get recommendations for things to buy from others who participate. I think it's fascinating to examine the science of the social web - to understand how social networks actually work. I have been thumbing through Programming Collective Intelligence, by Toby Segaran, which gives a primer on the algorithms behind so many of the Web 2.0 sites. Fascinating to think about how the people are connected, and how someone can take these connections and find a way to monetize them. Things like the Small World Phenomenon are pretty incredible. I wonder (and I am sure this happens a lot more than I know), but I wonder if there is some sort of mathematical formula you can use to see:

a) How much is a given profile worth? (social networking potential)
b) How can you say what features have more social reach (how many degrees of connection do they span and how quickly)
c) How vital is a given member to a group (structural cohesion)

Are companies like facebook and myspace already utilizing these kinds of models to apply value to their users? Is this possible? Does it work? Such cool stuff.

As someone who comes from a business background, and who is interested in sociology, I think that my new job will provide me with an avenue to explore the intersection of technology, marketing, sociology, and sales. It makes what is an exciting move that much more fascinating to me, and I can't wait to dive in headfirst. I'll be letting you know how it goes, and hopefully writing a lot more about this as I start to figure more of it out.