FreshNetworks Blog

A great example of using social media to gain an insight into the brand comes from Southwest, an airline in the US. Their blog, NutsAboutSouthwest, has just been relaunched with much more of a community feel. You can watch YouTube videos to get an insider’s view of their reservations team, take part in polls, comment on posts and post your own videos and photos.

The site serves to give customers an insight into the business. It is specifically not the place to raise personal customer service questions and in fact appears to be much more of an insight tool than a customer service one. The blog posts are used by internal staff to ask questions of their customers; getting immediate and sometimes detailed feedback. If they want they could then use this to go into wider testing in a focus group or survey, or they could just use this toe-in-the-water method to gauge what their customers are thinking.

The site is great and capturing customer information and insight in this way can have real benefits to brands. My one criticism would be the decision to moderate the site quite so heavily. Moderation is important, but it should not be at the expense of allowing members to shape and build their own community. The site only reaches it’s full potential when the members feel that they have some ownership of the community. Moderation can hinder this.

Rather than think just of moderation, it’s important to make sure you manage an online community like this correctly. You establish rules and pick enthusiastic members who will help you to keep order and encourage others to take part. Moderation is a police role. Management is more like a good host at a party. They make sure that people know where things are, introduce people with common interests, and also deal with situations before they might get out of hand.

The Southwest site is great and something I’d love to see more brands adopting, but a site like this only truly flourishes when you manage it rather than just moderate it.