Cafe2Go Podcast #7 – March 2007
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 by Shel Holtz, ABCIABC President Julie Freeman and 2006-2007 Chair Glenda Holmes dig into the communications, good and bad, employed by JetBlue following their recent crisis. Then, Michelle Bernhart discusses IABC’s involvement in ISO’s effort to develop a comprehensive set of standards for corporate social responsibility.
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March 13th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
Thank you for your constructive comments on JetBlue’s response to the recent troubles JetBlue put our customers and crewmembers through. You are absolutely right – David’s Flight Log should have been updated sooner, and we should have used our website better to communicate with our customers more directly. We used a web application for otherwise-garden variety weather alerts. We had it updated with links refund without charge, but we should have beefed it up a lot more.
As for my comments regarding the unsolicited calls to our headquarters from agencies and freelancers we had no prior relationship with – I can only point you to PRWeek for the follow-up editorial. My comments were rash and indeed, made in the heat of the moment to our profession’s trade journal. I absolutely rely on the advice and counsel of my network of professionals and through continual online study. I wish I didn’t have to learn this lesson in public, but it’s a Web 2.0 world after al!
http://www.prweek.com/us/sectors/crisiscommunications/article/636703/Taco-Bell-moves-curb-fears-rodent-video/
(I’m not sure that’s the right URL… It seems to point to the editorial but it’s titled for the Taco Bell story. ?)
Best,
Jenny Dervin
JetBlue Corporate Communications
March 14th, 2007 at 6:13 am
Thanks, Jenny, for your comments and for the link to the follow-up editorial. The additional context certainly helps provide perspective about the situation.
While no company–or communicator–handles everything perfectly all the time, there are certainly many things that we can learn from JetBlue’s response to this crisis. Thanks for responding to our podcast and for contributing to the dialogue in a positive way.
March 14th, 2007 at 6:25 am
[...] I, like many other regular airline travelers, have been following the news about the JetBlue crisis at JFK Airport in New York with great interest. In the March edition of IABC’s Cafe2Go, IABC President Julie Freeman, ABC, APR and I discussed what was right and wrong about the JetBlue crisis response. [...]
March 14th, 2007 at 8:26 am
[...] Learn more about IABC’s involvement and the ISO standard in today’s press release on this topic or in the March edition of Cafe2Go. [...]
March 16th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Advice on the podcast that Jetblue open it’s web site to whining outsiders makes about as much sense as the Hershey kisses at the airport.
As for Shel’s interview about the late 200NINE! advocacy project — I always think an interviewer is doing a good job when he asks the question that I’m thinking, and Shel nailed it, several times.
Excellent job.
What I wonder about Jetblue, and advocacy, is how often professional communicators in big organizations have the respect of senior managment, and the authority conferred upon them by senior management, to get deeply involved in prediciting bad things happening and then the authority to take steps to avoid those bad things.
This was not the first time passengers were stuck on airplanes owned by badly run airlines, at badly run airports. Smart PR people already know this is happening all over the world — how many of them have put avoidance programs in place?
I sorta thing advocacy in favor if improved respect and responsibility and authority now beats some ISO thing years from now, but what the heck..
Is IABC buying airplane tickets for people to fly to Switzerland to meet with people from 35 other organizations, in Geneva?
If anyone gets to go, allow a few days extra and rent a car and drive south from Geneva on the back roads through Grenoble and on to Grasse and Cannes. It’s one of the great roads in the world, and the best road I’ve ever been on. Allow two days to Cannes. I did it in one and that was a mistake.
There’s an international airport in Nice that will get the IABC delegates back to their homes around the world. I think it is the same airport that was called Beaumont Sur Mer in the greatest movie ever made, Dirty Rotten Scoiundrels.
Have fun.
BAK