Nuts About Southwest

Angela is being much too modest! She was the inspiriation for our blog. About a year ago, she came to me and asked if I would be interested in working on a blog Team. I replied, "What the @#$% is a blog?" Without her hard work, her research, and her perseverance, this project would never have happened.

The past year has been a great experience, and a big reason for that is Angela's infectious enthusiasm.Â

Wow - it has already been six months? Hard to believe how time flies. If you are soliciting feature requests, I would love to have a "View posts since last visit" option.

And thanks to all at SWA who make this blog possible and for letting us, your adoring public, have a venue to communicate.

I appreciate that Southwest is still the only airline courageous/wise/not-so-full-of-itself enough to have a blog. I am impressed that nearly everything (as far as I can tell), including complaints, is allowed through moderation.

My first suggestion is the addition of user accounts, and the ability of "trusted" users to post without moderation. I think making more of the replies immediate would help increase discussion and traffic to the blog. Granted, the issues inherent in managing a user community might be more than the blog team wants to tackle, but it can be done.

Great job on the blog! I have enjoyed following your progress over the past six months and think that Southwest is certainly a trailblazer among corporate bloggers.

To that end, (and this is not intended to be a sales pitch) I am the co-founder and CEO of a company that is seeking to provide the next generation applications so that businesses can do a better and more efficient job of engaging with customers over the Web. Our view has been that part of that effort is blogging, but that there are other parts which include monitorning and engaging on external sites, enabling customers to start conversations amongst themselves, and providing dashboards into the comment and conversation activity at home base as well as across the web.

I would greatly appreciate any time or comments here or by email that anyone on the team has about the positives and negatives of your blogging (i.e. web customer engagement) experience from the perspective of delivering value for Southwest's business.

These thoughts will help us to deliver applications that you may wish to use to take web customer engagement to the next level. As the trail blazers, we would be eager to know what challenges you'd like to overcome.

Thanks in advance and keep up the great work!

-- brian

What a great blog this is. It makes my long days at the phoenix reservations center a little more enjoyable. Thanks everyone.

Great blog but could use a little fine tuning.
Names of posters should be at the top.
A line between posts.
The ability to edit a post.

I LUV the blog! I can't believe it's been six months! It doesn't seem like it's been that long; it's gone by quickly.
This is off topic, but I wanted to say I flew to CMH for a CSA GI & am still waiting to see if I go for a one-on-one. We were told we'll get a call in two to three weeks if we go back, & if not, we'll get a letter. As of today (Wednesday), it's been a week & a half. On Nov. 8th, I have a GI for RSA in OKC. After working one, or both, of those positions for a few years, I'll try again for FA.

So Angela... now we know! You were the visionary behind this blog project. I love it! Now I see why Brian loves it too, being on a team with five beautiful women!
I am sure this has been his best assignment yet!
All kidding aside, thanks to all of you! You do a great job!
I've especially enjoyed the special interest stories.

Often times we hear about our Employee Catastrophic Assistance Charity but most of us do not know how
it is decided on who is granted assistance. I am sure there must be some wonderful stories involving the families that have received help from this charity.
I would imagine many families would prefer to keep their most difficult times private, but others might like to share their story.

Again, thanks to all of you for your hard work!
Congratulations on the first six months! K.

I enjoy reading this blog. I check it everyday while I'm at work. I'd love to see some "day in the life" stories from everyone (pilots, FA's, CSR, Ramp Rats, Scheduling). I think it would just be great to get a behind the scenes look at daily SWA operations.

Count me in as another fan of the SWA blog! I love the fact that I work for a company that not only welcomes comments from customers but from employees, too. I especially enjoy the behind-the-scenes blogs from people in different departments. It's like a day getting a day in the field while I'm in my PJ's sipping coffee (I read the blog at home!) I agree with Marcus - keep 'em coming!

Happy Anniversary!