Influence in social media is often a very tricky thing to measure. Sometimes it’s pretty obvious. If you have 1.66 million followers, there is a good chance you’re pretty influential. Southwest Airlines learned that the hard way when they decided to kick off film director Kevin Smith for being ‘too fat’. In this instance, Southwest had a lot of reasons (1.66 million + to be exact) not to boot Smith from the flight in the way they did.
What happened:
Smith of Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Mall Rats fame (aka Silent Bob of Jay + Silent Bob) was booted from the Southwest flight for allegedly being too big to fit in one seat and would have caused another passenger discomfort and potential safety issues. Whether or not this is true isn’t really the point, the fact is it happened to a very influential man in social media.
The aftermath:
The result is a social media maven on a mission to destroy a poitically incorrect brand by flexing his social media muscles and throwing his weight around online this time. The resulting twitter onslaught by Smith undoubtedly caused harm to the image of Southwest Airlines. Smith went on full assault tweeting throughout the day such as the following
Wanna tell me I’m too wide for the sky? Totally cool. But fair warning, folks: IF YOU LOOK LIKE ME, YOU MAY BE EJECTED FROM @SOUTHWESTAIR.
The bigger picture is every major and minor news source picked up this story. From CNN to The Wall Street Journal, millions of dollars worth of bad press has been published for Southwest Airlines.
As a rebuttal, Southwest went on to offer multiple apologies including a blog post on the official Southwest Blog which wasn’t really an apology as much as a ‘you’re still wrong’ statement. Still unsatisfied by being called “Too Fat To Fly” yet again, Smith went off again on his own blog at SilentBobSpeaks.com leaving it at
Southwest, I appreciate you refunding my airfare. But if you’re not gonna admit I wasn’t Too Fat To Fly, then I’ll cover it.
Next time we’ll look at the Kevin Smith vs Twitter fiasco and show just how one bad experience tweeted can be a full-blown social media induced PR nightmare.
I can’t agree more what a really well written story, thank you for writing it.
I agree what a really well written story, thank you for writing this!