By Quentin Langley
It has been a week since Southwest Airlines lost a passenger in a most dramatic fashion: Jennifer Riordan was literally sucked out of a plane mid-flight.
Looking back at this incident we see all the features of Twenty First Century crisis:
The key one is live vlogging. As other airlines have discovered, you have to assume that someone is recording every customer incident. More recently, Starbucks has discovered the same thing. The barrier between public and private space has disappeared. In this incident, the events were being broadcast live on Facebook. Other passengers on the plane could actually have been viewing what passenger was broadcasting. Had the plane come down, passengers could have broadcast their own deaths.
This changes the way the wider public views the developing crisis in breathtaking ways.
Social media - especially video platforms such as YouTube and Facebook Live - are revolutionary technologies. They put into the hands of virtually everyone, technology that was carefully licensed and controlled by governments just a few years ago.
But they also give participants in the crisis - such as Southwest CEO Gary Kelly - the opportunity to respond immediately.
As recently as the 1990s, your editor was involved in a business crisis in which a TV documentary grossly distorted what a spokesman for the company said. We had the video to prove it. If this had taken place after 2005, we could have posted the video on YouTube and exposed the documentary makers as frauds.
Kelly's performance in this video is professional. He doesn't have the natural flair of a Richard Branson. He cannot visibly emote the way Branson does. There would have been a catch in Branson's voice and tears in his eyes. He would have name checked Jennifer Riordan, and her closest family.
Sure, I realize that the first response may not have been able to name check Riordan, because the name may not have been public at that point, but Branson would have followed up when it was. He would also have been on the scene within hours. But not everyone is Richard Branson. It is not a reasonable expectation of most CEOs.
The rest of Southwest's response was equally professional. A team was sent to liaise with the family and make travel arrangements for them. Grieving families have a deep personal need to visit the site of the tragedy - or as near as they can get - and airlines have the infrastructure to make that happen.
This is a textbook case study. Students will be reviewing the handling of this for years.
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