JetBlue CEO David Neeleman launched a blog in September 2006. He calls it a FlightLog.
But… OOPS. He hasn’t posted a new entry since Feb. 1st, despite the uproar from angry passengers over the dozens of flights cancelled because of last week’s winter storm.
A couple of thoughts: I looked more closely at Neeleman’s FlightLog and realized that technically it really isn’t a “blog” I.e. you can’t link to individual entries, you can’t leave a comment, and trackbacks aren’t enabled for other bloggers who might want to link to Neeleman’s postings.
There’s also no RSS feed.
That’s a problem and a puzzling one. Why suggest this is a blog – an interactive, easily discoverable (via RSS) Web page – when it isn’t?
The bigger problem, of course, is the lapse in posting. One of the biggest faux pas for a CEO blogger is silence during a crisis. Let me say that more charitably, the biggest challenge for a CEO blogger is what to say in a crisis. But ya gotta say something.
Meanwhile, mainstream media is eating up JetBlue’s predicament with a stream of stories.
Ouch
C’mon guys. This isn’t that hard to do. Why ignore a channel that you’ve got set up (although, as noted above, not set up properly) whereby you can communicate directly with customers?
Update
OK, JetBlue’s corporate comms team appears to be struggling to get this right. They’ve created and posted to the corporate site a YouTube video interview with CEO Neeleman talking about a Customer Bill of Rights. But they still don’t quite get how this works. Hey guys, you need to embed the video into his “blog.”
[Via Cathy Taylor on AdFreak]