Update: American Airlines is NOT on Twitter.

August 24th, 2008

The other day I wrote at length about what American might do with the “AmericanAir” account on Twitter. Turns out — just as in the case of the ExxonMobil account earlier this summer — the account isn’t official.

The evidence? This comment on my post from AA spokesman Billy Sanez:

We are aware of the “AmericanAir” account on Twitter. This account is not an official communication/conversation effort by American Airlines and we are looking into who set that up.

(As for his bona fides, I’ve already traded e-mails with Sanez, plus he’s recently been quoted in the media here, here, and here.)

It’s good that AA has someone keeping a finger on the pulse of the social media for them. And shame on whichever misguided person decided to represent themselves as speaking for the company. If it’s just a prank, it’s not a good one, and even if it’s well-meaning, it’s ill-advised.

One of the key tenets of social media is — or should be — transparency. The technology underlying blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and so on allows for many-to-many conversations like never before. But it won’t work for corporations to treat these media at arm’s length, or for corporate representatives, official or unofficial, to be anything less than transparent in their actions.

American Airlines, at least, seems to be on the case, and I hope their initial stumbles will give way to an effective social media presence. As I’ve said before, some airline is eventually going to come up with something that separates it from its competitors. I’d like nothing better than to see AA succeed on the back of an honest, well-executed social media initiative.

More specifically, I hope to talk more with Sanez later in the week — and I’ll be sure to share any findings with you here.

Category: Social media, Transportation

2 Comments so far

rsomers August 26th, 2008 4:50 am

Nothing in Sanez’ statement indicates whether the person who set up the account works at AA or not - sounds like he doesn’t know.

Is it brandjacking if the person proves to be 1) internal, and 2) motivated by the desire to move AA into social media?

I think we’re going to see a lot of the following scenario: Company X has no clue about social media. A junior person at Company X decides “I have to bring this brand into the 21st century, but something new like this will never get approved. So I’ll start tweeting/networking/whatever under the company’s name, and if it proves successful I’ll use that to justify launching a formal program.” They start tweeting and it hits the PR/blogosphere that “hey, Company X is on Twitter!” Company X’s PR folks deny any involvement, and the Twitterverse concludes that Company X was brandjacked. Which maybe it was - semantics - but it’s more the PR equivalent of a skunkworks project without formal approvals at the top. Happens all the time in engineering.

The Hoover’s tweeter started in similar fashion six months ago, actually - just an experiment without any authorization. Rob L secured ‘@hoovers’ as a handle and asked if I wanted to use it, so I tweeted a bit to test the waters. The fact that Guy Kawasaki was following us served as enough justification when it came to the president’s attention (he’s a fan of Guy’s work). So he allowed it to continue, and @zackgonzales now represents for the Hoov.

Tim Walker August 26th, 2008 5:26 am

Interesting thoughts, Russ — and I can easily imagine your scenario applying to both ExxonMobil and American Airlines.

I don’t know how fruitful the term “brandjacking” is in this case — which is why I didn’t use it in either post. Both of the Twitter accounts in question said nothing but good things about the respective companies, and for better or worse no company copletely “owns” its brand.

I’m prone to call it “brandhacking” — with white- and black-hat equivalents, just like computer hacking.

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