Chewing the Fat (Guy)

(Sorry I’m a little late to the party on this one…had to get my new blog up before I could post this.)

Front line staff should be a direct extension of your public relations team. Just ask the folks at Southwest Airlines, who flew into some rough air when they booted famed geek, film director and “Silent Bob” legend Kevin Smith for being “too wide to fly.”

You’ve doubtless heard at least part of the story. Smith norm

ally buys two seats “for comfort” when he flies, but went for a standby flight that didn’t have two seats available. Thus he tried to cram his corpulent self into one seat and was soon removed from the plane due to “safety risks” in accordance to Southwest’s “customers of size” policy.

It’s as if Smith became the real-life Hurley on Oceanic 815. No wait, Hurley was never hustled off the doomed plane due to his portly proportions. (Heck he even had a guitar case with him.) If he had been, ‘Lost’ would be far less interesting in my book. Hmm.

In other words: a famous guy, with more than 1.6 million Twitter followers was humiliated publicly and unnecessarily. Hell, even if he weren’t famous, didn’t anyone learn from United’s broken guitar incident?

Now Smith is flooding his Twitter account with nasty notes to/about Southwest. The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance is screaming for a Southwest boycott; all uncharted waters for “America’s Favorite Airline.”

“If a customer cannot comfortably lower the armrest and infringes on a portion of another seat, a customer seated adjacent would be very uncomfortable and a timely exit from the aircraft in the event of an emergency might be compromised if we allow a cramped, restricted seating arrangement,” Southwest said in a statement on their blog entitled “Not So Silent Bob”. They also offered him a $100 travel voucher.

I cannot disagree that being crammed into my seat because the guy beside me is overflowing his own is a drag and really aggravates me. I suspect a lot of flyers will feel the same way and offer support to Southwest. But that’s not enough to avert a PR meltdown.

What this really gets down to is the fact that Southwest humiliated a passenger; a famous passenger at that. One whose bulk famously broke a toilet, yes, but more importantly one who has more than a million people willing to listen to him say “Go F*ck Yourself, Southwest” and liken its service to that of a “bus.”

I suspect Southwest’s PR team probably has felt fairly immunized by years of “love” from their customers. This event—where front line staff react to a situation in the worst possible way—is proof that public relations shouldn’t be reactive. It should be proactive.

Front line staff should have known better; and if it isn’t the PR department’s responsibility to make sure staff are trained correctly in these matters, then they should have made it their business long ago. Your first line of defense against bad Public Relations is your front line service staff. They’re the difference between people chewing the fat about how great you are or throwing your fat in the fire.