Travel industry personality Chris McGinnis, who's worked everywhere from CNN Headline News to Expedia, had a particularly travel-y LA earthquake experience yesterday:
I was in the security screening area at LAX and my bag was in the x-ray machine. All of a sudden every machine and magnetometer started beeping and blinking red wildly and the overhead monitors were shaking and the TSA folks were yelling "STOP, STOP, ALL STOP."
We all sorta looked at each other as the quake rolled by. I was ready to jump under the metal table it if got any worse. The Japanese lady with her two kids in front of me with Hello Kitty bags looked at me like "So what's the big deal here?"
About two minutes went by, and the machines came back on and my bag popped out and I packed up, put my shoes on and carried on. Everyone was shaking their heads and saying things like "Welcome to California, folks."
Where did McGinnis publish his first-hand account? Facebook, obviously.
After taking a resounding thumping from justabouteveryone, the American Airlines blog is back with its fourth post ever. While it'd be hard to do worse than the corporate doublespeak of post three, the most recent update is, if not inspiring, mildly useful in communicating information.
If you're gonna do the social media-as-PR thing, it's apparently blog first, Facebook application second:
We have recently added a Facebook feature and wanted to hear what you thought about the "American Airlines Travel Bag" application. Our goal is to generate tool that would help customers share their favorite hangouts, restaurants and spots when they travel.
There's a link to the AA website with more info on the application, which proves the airline is starting to get this whole "series of tubes" thing. Maybe soon they'll even dress up the new blog with, you know, something other than the boilerplate Blogger template!
We went by the office of the Zagat guides yesterday for a little chat with Tim and Nina--more on that next week--and they reminded us about their new mobile service, which debuted this summer. Just point your web-enabled phone or BlackBerry to Zagat.mobi and get more restaurant reviews than you'll know what to do with.
Once you've got the page up, you can search by neighborhood, cuisine or new openings. We like the "SMS to Friend" feature, which we imagine would make meeting up with pals much easier. And since the service is ad-supported, it's free.
Zagat is also cracking Facebook with a new application for nightlife spots and restaurants that have pages on the social network. Once they're approved by the survey, businesses can drop the widget on their Facebook page and see it constantly updated with the latest, imminently quotable reviews.
The red-headed step sister to MySpace, Facebook, has extended its members' ability to share every facet of their lives -- thoughts, background, geographic location -- with total strangers. The stalker guide, er, social networking site has added "Where I've Been," a Google Maps-esque utility.
Members who download the detailed, interactive world map can share where in the world they've visited. It includes a zoom tool and all the U.S. states and there is no need to create an account on any third party site. Users can differentiate, according to color, where they've lived, where they've visited, and where they want to visit. We poor writers are going to be filling up our maps with a lot of the latter category.
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by pbb
