US Airways Social Media Team Crashes But Their Flack Deserves Parachute

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By: Mike Bush

It may be a bit of a piling on, since most folks have, at the very least, heard a bit about US Airway’s recent social media…turbulence? The gist, for those who missed it, is as follows:

Passenger sends tweet complaining about delay.
US Air says “we’re sorry.”
Passenger continues to complain.
US Air tweets our exceptionally NSFW, vulgar image that includes a woman doing something with a model airplane that…well…you get the picture.

Huff-Po has it covered, and thankfully, did so with limited visibility.

If you’re riding along for the schadenfreude, Inquisitr’s view from the cockpit (too soon?) rounds up the Internet snark really well (serious hat tip to Jelisa Castrodale for the following: If the @USAirways plane got that woman pregnant, you just *know* the baby will be late...)

And naturally, there’s a PR person who now needs to try to take this story out of a tailspin. We’ll hear about investigating how this happened, and revising social media policies. There may even be statements about creating a two-layer approach to posting (meaning one person writes, and a second is necessary to approve a post going live).

If the media is kind, they will only quote a “spokesperson for the company.” After all, the Internet writes in ink, and if that spokesperson is given a name, it becomes a name that will forever be associated with defending the company whose social team dropped a whole new version of the mile-high club onto an unsuspecting customer.

For that (hopefully nameless) spokesperson, just know that everyone here at Flack Me either understands your pain, or is desperately thinking of ways to ensure they never have to go through it.

Good luck to this person, and hopefully he or she has put their tray in the upright and locked position and is wearing their seat belt.

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About the Author

Mike Bush is a PR and Marketing freelancer with more than a dozen years of experience in the field. Find him on and connect Twitter @mikebush or at www.mikebush.nyc.

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