Southwest Airlines has revamped its corporate blog, Nuts About Southwest, and the airline is burning up the social media sites to promote it. We heard about it via Twitter, which is fast becoming our go-to spot for up-to-the-second travel news.
The new site also prominently features Flickr photos, podcasts and a "video blog" space. At the bottom, you'll find links to SWA's pages on Facebook and Linkedin, proving once again that the PR types at the airline know what the kids like.
News about Southwest still makes up a bulk of the blog content, in the form of both press releases and conversational posts. There's no getting around the fact that this is a marketing effort for the airline, but it's by far the best airline blog around.
OK, so we're totally obsessed with Twitter these days. The best way we've heard it described is as a global watercooler. And who doesn't like gossiping about new routes and poorly dressed passengers with a bunch of other travel junkies?
We've been spending more and more time on the site, chatting with people like Jaunted member CaroPhila, travel troubleshooter Chris Elliott and even the PR peeps from Southwest Airlines.
Wanna get in on the shoptalk? All you've gotta do is follow us.
As if we need to hype Twitter any more than we already do, it's now the tool of choice for getting out of prison in Egypt.
Journalist and grad student James Karl Buck was detained by the Egyptian police along with his translator and friend Mohammed Salah Ahmed Maree. Buck sent out a one-word tweet and soon enough his network of followers contacted his university and the US Embassy. He was sprung a few hours later.
Maree is still being held incommunicado, and Buck has dedicated his personal website to getting him released. The sort-of fortunate tech-happy outcome aside, the saga is a good reminder of why the State Department recommends avoiding public demonstrations in Egypt.
We like hanging out on Twitter, sharing watercooler talk with PR types, other travel junkies and even the couple of airlines that share their news through the microblogging service.
Usually JetBlue or Southwest, two of the airlines we follow, just point us to links on their respective blogs, which is cool. But this tweet from today seems to be the first announcement anywhere of a new beverage coming to Southwest flights. How web 2.0!
Now, we're not sure a confined airplane cabin is the best place for energy drinks, but you gotta hand it to Southwest for knowing how to market stuff to the kids these days.
A couple days ago we found out there is a Delta Twitter. Though we have not idea who is running the Delta page, we almost dismissed it out of hand because the first message appeared to be about Mile High Mojitos. But not so fast, though the page is mostly full of press release tweets, and pointers to Delta employee bulletin board posts on sites such as FlyerTalk, if you read between the lines you will see the Delta employee who runs the page is actually attempting to not only rapidly answer messages, but also let passengers in on some of the lesser known new Delta changes.
For instance, we learned that Delta has changed their carry-on policy to include guitars and other instruments:
We know that your musical instrument is important to you and depending on the size, we accept musical instruments or equipment as checked baggage, carry-on baggage, or cabin-seat baggage. Please help us to keep your instrument safe by bringing it in a hard-shell case.
In addition to changing its policies regarding carry-on instruments, Delta has also expanded the maximum dimensions for checked-instruments, now allowing a combined (length + width + height) size of 120 inches and 100 lbs.
Many airlines insist musicians check their instruments or purchase another airline seat for their instrument.
We recently set up an account and gave it a test tweet (ugh, unfortunately, that is what they call it) this week during our Skybus coverage extravaganza.
If you are into such things add us as a friend and we will add you back. Let's see if this Twitter craze is of any use to hyper travelers.
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by pbb
