It's too late to enter, but Southwest Airlines has completed a caption contest for the BlogWorldExpo.
Blog World Expo is going to be one of the biggest blog and social media events we've run across, and if you have the opportunity, you definitely should try to make it out there.
Southwest is really the focus of this post, because they do so well what all marketers should be trying to do. They integrate their marketing message across their entire enterprise.
Quick, what's the Southwest brand? If you said fun, friendly service, then you've flown Southwest and watched their commercials. Southwest, a "discount" airline, is one of the few profitable airlines in the country. Part of that is their business model, but part of it is their marketing.
From their television commercials to their billboards to their blog, Southwest promotes the freedom that flying is supposed to represent. Though they compete on price, Southwest focuses on the experience of flying, which is directly impacted in large part by the people that work for them.
Southwest has a blog, called Nuts About Southwest, that regularly has hundreds of comments, and most of them are positive. It's the perfect blog strategy, as it supports and extends their brand into the blogosphere, but the real genius is not in writing some happy pieces. Southwest identified their major strength, customer service, and launched a blog that showcases that strength. The big competitors, United, Northwest, American - how could they possibly blog? The amount of hate mail coming their way would overwhelm the system.
The closer competitor, Jet Blue, has a blog, but, well, no one is going to confuse that with a blog anytime soon. Check out Nuts About Southwest, and then look at your own company. What do you do better than anyone else, and how can you turn that into something blogworthy?
hattip for the contest: Douglas Karr
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