THE PLANK FEBRUARY 21, 2007
-
Read Later
READ LATERAvailable only to subscribers. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
-
Listen
ARTICLE AUDIO
- Font Size
We've read a lot about last November as the "YouTube election," how YouTube was transforming politics, etc. What about YouTube transforming business? Here's the new -- and almost shocking to watch -- JetBlue apology video, depicting JetBlue's sunken-lidded-and-sleepless-eyed CEO taking a page from the Don Sherwood Confessional Spot Manual to damage-control the company's meltdown last week:
The impression left by this YouTube video, though, is strange. It's one thing to see politicians on YouTube -- we formerly saw them all the time on TV, so it's more subtle what the new medium adds. Most top businesses, other than the self-consciously quirky ones like Google or Ben & Jerry's or whatever, convey more of a suits-in-secret-boardrooms image than a CEO-of-the-people-talking-to-us-on-screen one. JetBlue was already sort of in the latter category, with its low-budget, sort of populist mission, but I bet we'll see more of this: Imagine if we'd lived in a world where, after Enron broke, Ken Lay went on YouTube.
--Eve Fairbanks
4 comments
it isn't really right to say that he "went on Youtube" as if Youtube were some kind of network. It is not. They simply taped a video and uploaded it to Youtube, as they could have done (and maybe did)to any of the other 20-odd video sites that have sprung up in the last year. To say "he went on youtube" sounds too much like "going on television (or radio)" or "putting an ad in the newspaper" but there is something different about simply uploading a video to youtube. I'm not quite sure what that difference is and I'm not sure anybody does yet. We haven't developed a vocabulary for talking about these things yet. Again, not trying to nitpick, I just wanted to register some dissent about how it was worded.
- drakeuni
February 21, 2007 at 4:17pm
BFD. People are still stranded, and JetBlue still sucks. YouTube is irrelevant.
- teplukhin
February 21, 2007 at 4:25pm
because he just spent a couple days moldering in a plastic chair in some airport while a proximate JetBlue customer was overloading her last Pamper? Um, not likely. Meanwhile, a JetBlue flack named Brian Baldwin told AP, "From the outset we've been very upfront about how we made a mistake during the past few days. We want to make sure our customers know that." Translation: our bad, ergo we cool. Hey Brian, get back to me when JetBlue's internal policies require that all company executives traveling for business or pleasure be treated exactly like their customers.
- williamyard
February 21, 2007 at 9:32pm
I find all of this hostility to JetBlue a little hard to understand. My friends who have flown JetBlue in the past rave about how great they are, and keep trying to convince me to use them. (Alas, they don't fly to KY.) Moreover, from everything I have seen they have behaved very responsibly since then, issuing huge numbers of refunds, vouchers, investing in new equipment, IT, etc. This is the kind of thing you don't usually see from any industry, but particularly not the airline companies.
- prometheusnox
February 21, 2007 at 11:10pm