Boeing

There is a good video presentation by Todd Blecher of Boeing on Vimeo. He references Star Wars and Obi-Wan Kenobi to showcase how Boeing evolved their social media outreach from “snoringly” boringly technical to real, authentic, interactive and (oh my gosh!!!) personal.

You have to get through some ads and sales stuff to see the video. It’s worth it to see how a highly technical BIG company grew into an effective approach to social media.

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The New York Times has a good article about an incident involving Boeing. It’s worth a read.

When I began reading the article and saw that Boeing had responded to a small child who had taken the time to send them his ideas for a new plane with a “legalled” up form letter, I was appalled. And even though they have recently jumped on to Twitter, their response to feedback on the microblogging site still seemed old paradigm big business. (We have a process here on top of the mountain!)

However, it turns out that Boeing gets it. They saw an opportunity to connect and to improve their public relations through this incident and they did it. Good for them. And if a large corporation with layers and layers of administration, legal and bureaucracy can step away from their ivory tower long enough to realize that they are dealing with human beings – in this case little human beings – then any organization can too.

What would your organization do if it was called out like this on Twitter? How would you respond?

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