Originally Posted by
Weatherboy
It's very risk for an EVP of a publically traded company to be posting his opinions in an online message board.
But if that's how they run their airline, I wouldn't put any credibility into any comparisons they make vs. CO.
It is no longer unusual for more innovative companies' management to blog. At least 5% of the Fortune 500 have a corporate blog.
This includes executives a number of notable public companies:
- Jonathan Schwartz; President of SUN Microsystems;
- Bob Lutz; Vice-Chairman of General Motors;
- Robert Scoeble; Technical Evangelist for Microsoft;
- Randy Baseler; VP of Marketing for Boeing;
- Marc Cuba; owner HDNet and Dallas Mavericks;
- John Dragoon; CMO of Novell;
- Diane Greene; President of VMWare (now part of EMC)
- Sab Kunaijia; VP NBC Digital Media;
- J. Willard Marriott Jr.; CEO of Marriott;
- Ted Leonsis; Vice-Chairmal, America Online;
- Michael Tiemann; CTO, RedHat;
- Hu Yoshida; VP and CTO; Hitachi Data Systems;
A list of over 200 executives who blog can be found at:
http://www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki....s.CEOBlogsList
Sure, there's a risk (much less from the SEC and much more from the types of bottom-feeders who give all attorneys a bad name). But blogs that appear open and honest (including "we made a mistake") fly well with customers. Those that are obviously written by PR hacks don't. But it's probably good practice to have your PR department review your work ... this would prevent backfiring through this sort of arrogance, as allegedly spouted by Mr. Urbahn.
Now, I understand the temptation to crow about improved behavior, especially after the significant egg on B6's face. But bashing the competition in this case is dangerous and quite likely to backfire. Whoever wrote this just does not get it ... these sorts of statistics are relevant in the long term. Having a lucky weekend where your competition got hit worse than you did (and where you fudged the numbers by canceling flights) doesn't mean you've fixed your problems. Nobody buys the "quick fix" ... One lucky weekend doesn't make you "better."
The following is not bad ... but all of the positive karma is reversed by the claim in the last paragraph. Anyone with a single P.R. course from a community college ... or who has read "P.R. for dummies" would know better. Certainly, this "Trey Urbahn" should; hence I have some suspicion that this is the work of an impostor.
JetBlue is different. Perhaps that's why we are held to a higher standard. Our crewmembers have built a great airline and are proud it, as by the way, am I. Last month, we let our customers down. In addition to apologizing and compensating those who we inconvenienced, we made a commitment not to let it happen again. We articulated this commitment externally in our customer Bill of Rights. Internally, we identified areas where we made mistakes and have taken substantive steps to correct them. I may be biased, but I believe in giving credit where credit is due: Thanks to the dedication and hard work of our crewmembers, we managed to meet and overcome a significant weather event yesterday. In doing so, we've proved to our customers and to ourselves that we're different because we're better.