BuzzMachine

Ed Cone tells a story of an airline’s exquisite stupidity. He shows a picture of the jammed seats behind his jammed row 11 and the empty seats ahead and says:

What’s going on? An industry that has forgotten about customer service.

Almost nobody opted to pay $30 bucks extra to sit in “economy plus,” which promises a few inches of extra legroom. When it became clear that the flight would be packed six across from row 11 back while row after row sat empty in the front, people asked if they could move up. The flight attendants said no, you have to pay for those seats. Not very customer-friendly or situationally aware, but comprehensible.

So a guy asks if he could pay on the spot. Nope. People were laughing at the United’s cluelessness, but it wasn’t very friendly laughter.

When the drink cart came by I bought myself $5 worth of stress relief and asked the flight attendant (politely) why she could sell me a drink but not a seat. She looked at me like I had two heads and said they are in no way set up to take reservations, you have to do that with a service representative.

I started to say I didn’t want a reservation, I wanted to hand her $30 and move up one freaking row, but it felt like I was on the phone with Bangalore and couldn’t get a supervisor, so I just shut up and drank.

To recap: They don’t know how to allocate their seating categories, they aren’t going to let people spread out across a half-empty plane as a courtesy, and they turn down the chance to upsell on the spot, even though they do commerce in the aisles all the time.

What a stupid industry.

They’re so stupid they think their business strategy is to imprison passengers. They’re so stupid they don’t know how to take passengers’ money. They’re so stupid they don’t realize — or apparently care — how stupid they are. Too bad the all-powerful internet couldn’t give us all wings.

Just as I was researching a column for the Guardian on Starbucks’ MyStarbucksIdea and Dell’s IdeaStorm — both of which use Salesforce.com’s Ideas platform — I got an email from Business Week asking me to write about Starbucks. So here’s a twofer: my Guardian column about this new platform for customers to share ideas (and my wish that it would come to government) and the Business Week story about Starbucks.

Here are some added quotes from my interviews.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com on the platform:

* On the genesis of Ideas: “We started using the technology ourselves to talk to our community about what they wanted from salesforce. We called the site ideas.salesforce.com, and we noticed right away that this was a powerful way for us to connect with our community and to make sure that we were delivering the right services and features at the right time. Our product managers have to deliver highly-ranked features and work with Ideas if they are going to succeed in our company. It’s like a live focus group that never closes. I love it and look at it all the time. After using it for a while, we decided this had to be part of our portfolio, so we acquired the assets of the company that built it (called Crispy News), and the employees work at salesforce now.”

* On whether this is really new. “I believe that these days, the rapid communication that is enabled by wikis, blogs, Twitter, YouTube and you name it ensures that no matter what kind of company you are, your customers are having a conversation about your products and practices. The question that every company has to ask is: ‘Do I want to be part of this conversation? Do I want to learn from it? Am I willing to innovate on the basis of it?’ If you harness the power of this community, you will benefit. If you turn your back on it, you get further and further out of touch while competitors flourish. So yes, I think this is a new kind of communication for a new age of customer engagement.

The dead-end suggestion box and the auto reply are symbols of corporate indifference and are no longer tolerated. Customers expect a higher level of responsiveness now, and they will go where they find it. We learned this when we were pioneering Software as a Service. We had to stay connected with our customers or they would not continue their subscriptions. We needed to hear their ideas, or we would miss out on their creativity. And most important, they needed to talk to each other. Dell and Starbucks are pioneers in understanding this.

* On response to Dell’s IdeaStorm: “…But the response was mind-blowing. To be honest, Michael and I were both surprised at both the volume and the content. It was absolutely fascinating to watch, and for Dell, it has opened a new chapter for a terrific brand. Michael was kind enough to share his experience with Howard Schultz at Starbucks, and then we helped them build mystarbucksidea.com

* What about government starting ideastorms? “That is simply a killer idea. We are in an election year of course, and I would like to see both parties use technology to better connect with the electorate. Salesforce Ideas is democracy, as the saying goes, red in tooth and claw. But you have to invest in a conversation—it’s not going to work unless there’s a real back-and-forth.”

From Chris Bruzzo, CTO and CIO of Starbucks and the leader of the MyStarbucksIdea project:

* On customers’ relationship with Starbucks: “Anybody who works for Starbucks… it’s this universal experence that people open up this to-do list that’s in their head. THey have very specific, detailed ideas. That’s a phenomenon. All these ingredients were in place. Howard [Schultz, the returning CEO] said to me we have to reconnect with customers and drive our company, Starbucks, as an entity to having a ’seeing culture.’”

* On this platform: “Our goals were to collect ideas and to understand which ideas have the most momentum and passion in our customer base
But it was also to open up a dialogue with customers and build up this muscle inside our company in having a give-and-take conversation with our customers. As compelling as the ideas themselves are, it’s almost as compelling to us from an objective standpoint to be able to have this kind of running dialogue with our customers: to close that loop in an authentic way and show the commitment on the part of Starbucks to responding to what we’ve heard, which is about putting those ideas in action or building those ideas together with customers and coming to a new place.”

* On integrating it with the company: “We were not going to simply have this be an opportunity for customers to share perspectives. We were truly going to adopt it into our business process — into product development and experience development and store design. In order to do that, I thought it was critically important to have real experts form the teams that were building our experience selected on the basis of their characteristic and trained to not only have the conversation but the advocacy for what customers were saying via this new channel. So that literally customers would have a seat at the table when product decisons are being made. They have champions inside the company that are advocating for that.”

* They launched it that the annual meeting, where 6,000 people showed up and started sharing their ideas. There’s still some debate whether people should be able to vote down, as well as up, the ideas. For now, Bruzzo says, “it’s a happy place.”

* After I saw one of the “idea partners” say there were things Starbucks was working on in secret related to the Starbucks card, I pushed Bruzzo on really being open. He said: “Onee of the things we have to worry about is IP and competitiveness. We will invest significantly to make enhancements to the Starbucks card platform, for example. We want a head start.” But he acknowledged the issue. “This is an evolution. The community is evolving and so is Starbucks. We’re going to have to rethink when we would disclose broadly about a particular strategy because we have a vested community. There are advantages to having that kind of transparency because it creates more engagement… and we actually get to iterate on our solutions while we’re building them. What we do wit the Starbucks card is likely to be a different process than it would have been without this community. I think it is changing and evolving our views of confidentiality and competitiveness.”

* Surprises? “That coffee classes perked up as much as it did. That shows a level of interest in coffee expertise that some of us were surprised at.”

* What about ideas that don’t work? Some customers are pushing for separate lines for brewed coffee (that is, faster lines without all the froo-froos). “The idea partner is in there saying we actually tried this here and there and these are some of the things we ran into. What do you guys think of that… If it fails our customers who are on MyStarbucksIdea ought to participate in being accountable for it.”

* What’s next? RSS and the ability to track an idea’s progress.

* Advice to other companies: “Don’t underinvest in adopting it into your business process. Take it seriously. See it as an important part of how you run your business…. Go for it. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Don’t attempt to perfect it. Learn. Iterate. Your community is incredibly forgiving actually if you show a real interest to listen and respond.”

Over at Seeking Alpha, where they reposted my recent rant about airlines, there’s a classic example of industry insiders in denial bitching at me: How dare I expect decent, civilized service. Water? You want water? Sit down and shut up. This is exactly the same reaction I get from whining real estate agents every time I dare to question whether I get 6 percent’s worth of value for the service they don’t provide. Head, meet sand, insert. It’s going to be fun watching them self-destruct. Couldn’t happen to better industries. Except perhaps cable and other protected monopolies and oligopolies. Bye-bye now. Bye-bye.

Michael Arrington just told his Twitter fans that Comcast has been for 36 hours and he’s told after a half-a-lifetime on hold that it’s California-wide. Others pipe in with their troubles. I go looking at the news and find more problems on the East Coast. Here you can watch the Comcast revolt spread across Twitter. Arrington is vowing “expend significant energy over the next three weeks trashing comcast.” Heh. Can’t wait to watch that. I also told him via Twitter that he should join forces with Bob Garfield at ComcastMustDie.

I’m willing to bet a few dollars that this could be the start of the first (or an early) consume revolt spread on Twitter (as the Laceygate revolt spread at SXSW): the instamob. I wonder whether Comcast is monitoring Twitter and whether it will be man enough to come in and explain what the hell is happening (without hold music).

Peter Himler, a PR exec who blogs at the refreshingly bluntly named The Flack, just told the story of his trip to Moscow and talks with big executives there about the empowered customer online. They didn’t much take to the idea:

My presentation focused on how the changed media landscape and the empowerment of citizens as journalists have caused a major re-think in how companies engage their customers. One attendee found it incredulous that a blogger would have the audacity to denigrate a company’s reputation, as was the case with the Comcast repairman video or Jeff Jarvis’s rants against Dell. Another asked whether it’s even legal to write negatively about a company or person. I cited the First Amendment, but also referenced the lawsuit brought against two former employees by Apple for divulging trade secrets.

It makes sense that a culture with a heritage of political totalitarianism would move into a culture of corporate totalitarianism: Better living through Gazprom. But I think the internet may well cause corporate dictatorships to fall faster than political ones.

Following Dell’s Ideastorm, Starbucks has no opened a forum — also powered by Salesforce.com — where customers can make suggestions then discuss and vote on them. Starbucks, of all companies, with its loyal and opinionated customers, should have been doing this years ago. Every company should be doing it now.

If auto companies had this five years ago, we’d all have told them to force their radio manufacturers to include a damned 39-cent plug so we could hook up our iPods. If airlines had it today, we’d tell them how to get out of their customer-service mess. Why does listening to your customers sound like a web 2.0 idea? It should be a business 1.0 necessity.

Already, there are clear themes coming out in the Starbucks discussion. Many customers are suggesting — and many more are agreeing — that our frequent-sipper cards should have our regular orders embedded in them so we could swipe the card at the door, make the order, pay for it, and avoid that damned line (making that damned line shorter for everyone else). Others are also suggesting they want to do the same with their iPhones. This genius comes not from MBAs or executives but from customers. If you’ll just listen.

More customers want express lines for simple drip orders or sandwich purchases. More want employees manning the cash registers instead of running around taking orders in advance and then messing them up (well, that’s my variation on the theme). Note the underlying chorus: those damned lines.

One customer gives decorating advice to avoid the stores wearing down and looking so ratty, as so many do.

One suggests what I’ve long wanted: a drain at the cream station to drain that excess coffee. Yes, it’d be expensive to retrofit that, but shouldn’t it be part of the spec for new stores now?

Get rid of the tip jars, says one customer — but others in the comments disagreee. That’s what is great about these Salesforce storms: out of the conversation will come some measurement of consensus.

There are calls for whole wheat.

Lots want free wi-fi (which means Starbucks hasn’t done a good job of telling people that it’s coming with its switch from T-mobile to AT&T).

This customer wants softer music. It is, after all, our office.

And, of course, stop the Vente madness.

What an incredible wealth of information, ideas — and caring — from customers. All you have to do is listen.

I believe that Salesforce’s Storms are an important new infrastructure for customer conversation — a forum mixed with Digg mixed with a suggestion box mixed with a company blog. I don’t understand why companies aren’t falling over themselves to at least offer their customers this opportunity. Too often, it’s because they’re scared of what their own customers will say. Except now, they’re saying it on the web anyway. That’s the lesson of Dell and now of Starbucks.

I have a column in Business Week’s customer-service issue arguing that customers who complain about you are doing you a great favor. Here’s the foreshortened version that fit in the magazine. And here’s my longer draft. Snippet from the draft:

Here’s some free advice: Go to Google, enter any of your company’s brands followed by the word “sucks,” and you will see the true consumers’ reports. Brace yourself, for it won’t be pretty. Wal-Mart’s unofficial Google Sucks Index turns up 165,000 results; Disney 530,000; Google 767,000. What’s yours?

Now don’t get mad at these people. Instead, help them get even with you. For these angry customers are doing you a great favor. They care enough about your product or service to tell you exactly what went wrong. Other customers may just desert you and head to the competition. But these customers are telling you what to fix. Listen to them. Help them. Respond to them. Ask their advice – and they’ll give it to you. . . .

You see, this is about more than putting out blog fires or quieting complaining customers. It’s about more than customer service; indeed some say that customer service is the new marketing (that was the title of a conference this month in San Francisco). No, this is about collaboration with your customers in every aspect of your business. If you enable them, they will provide customer service for each other. They will help design your products. They will sell your products. They will create your marketing message – they always did control your brand.

So when you reach out to that kvetching blogger you found online, you’re engaged in customer service as well as PR, market research, marketing, sales, and product development. You are reinventing your company – and, if you get there before your competitors, your industry. That is why you shouldn’t relegate this vital task to one department or some interns or consultants. You need to reorganize the company around this new relationship with your customer, finally putting that customer at the center of everything you do because – thanks to Google – you can. If you don’t, well, you’ll suck.

: Also in the current Business Week: a collaboratively annotated and updated version of Steve Baker’s and Heather Green’s popular cover story on blogs.

I never cease to be amazed anew at how cable companies think it is their job to make their customers’ lives difficult.

I challenge any cable executive to publicly go through the experience of being a customer at their own companies and tell me straight-faced that it’s pleasant and efficient and worth the money and effort.

Today, I drove a half-hour to the only Cablevision “store” within the area to get a cable card for our new TiVo (shhh; don’t tell anyone that I’m only now getting one). I walk in and face a wall of ladies who look more bored and angry than prisoners. I am told that they won’t give me a cable card. I must make an appointment and wait a day for the damned cable guy to come to our house to stick it in the slot. It wastes them money. It wastes me time. It wastes some more of my three free months from TiVo. It inconveniences me. It’s just stupid. I walk out angrier at Cablevision. But I’m stuck with them because Verizon tore up my street two years ago — exaggeration — to lay fibre but still has not hooked up Fios. I’m a prisoner and Cablevision knows it. But that is any excuse to treat customers this way>

For Christmas, I wanted to get my father broadband and so I contacted Bright House in Florida (with whom I used to work) to get a gift certificate. They don’t do that. Can’t I just give you money? No. So I order the service but only on the condition that the installer will hook up the wi-fi router I was wrapping for under the tree. Yes, they said, that’s included. I tell them not to tell my father and to wait until after Christmas to contact my father because, of course, it’s a present. The next day, the phone rings. They called my father. Good work, Bright House. Scrooge. I tell my father to reschedule but instead they cancel the entire account. They were going to bill him for his own present. They also tried to charge him $149 to hook up that modem. I spent a good hour and a half calling Bright House and having fits before they finally switched the billing and agreed to do what they said they would do and hook up the modem (saving the company, by the way, the expense, time, and effort of running a cable halfway around the house; I saved them money by buying a router and they complained).

And, of course, we mustn’t forget Bob Garfield’s jihad at Comcast Must Die.

The only solution to this is true competition and openness. At CES, Brian Roberts promised a Cablevision 3.0 with the customer at the center — all of you who believe him, raise your hands — and a new standard for TV devices. We’ll see.

Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove (no relation to Bright House) sets a higher standard for a fully open alternative. We must be able to plug any device we own to the connectivity coming into our homes and get to any content. It’s that simple. I shouldn’t need to call them to beg or go to their distant offices or ever, ever, every wait all day for the damned cable guy. Connectivity is electricity.

Rather than telling Comcast that they can’t grow any bigger, the FCC should be telling them one thing: Open up.

It’s not as if Facebook needs my defense; it has Microsoft’s millions. And I certainly can be accused of Facebook fervency in my writing. But I think some are too quick to jump on Facebook’s back precisely because it is so big and successful.

But I see something bigger happening here: I think Facebook is redefining how to make a mistake.

When they announced the newsfeed, they took their users by surprise and pissed them off. But after pulling back and explaining, it went ahead and, as it turns out, they were right: The newsfeed is the heart of Facebook and is, I’ve been arguing, a new interface for news elsewhere.

When they announced the ad program, they again took their users by surprise and didn’t include enough privacy controls for the users. But after pulling back and adding those controls, I’ll say again that I think they’re onto something. See what Matt McAlister says responding to my musings about airlines capturing the wisdom of their crowds the last few days:

Carrying the theme to retail markets, you can imagine that you will walk into H&M and discover that one of your first-degree contacts recently bought the same shirt you were about to purchase. You buy a different one instead. Or people who usually buy the same hair conditioner as you at the Walgreen’s you’re in now are switching to a different hair conditioner this month. Though this wouldn’t help someone like me who has no hair to condition.

That’s what Facebook’s ad strategy will work to deliver: social shopping. And I want that. Just as I’m interested in what apps friends install I’m interested in what products they buy, so long as they are willing to tell me, and also what they think of them.

Now comes the Scoble Plaxo kerfuffle. Facebook did right: It protected my email from going to the dreaded Plaxo. It cut off Scoble for violating the TOS. But it then reinstated Scoble before he could make a video whining about them. Plenty of folks say they did right.

But now to the bigger point: how Facebook makes mistakes. See Rick Segal defending Zuckerberg on this point:

The larger issue and concern for me is the piling on from Bloggers and questionable Political Action Groups when it comes to pounding on Mark Zukerberg. I turn fifty in 22 days so I can clearly say Mark is a kid. He is going to make lots of mistakes and he will continue to learn and grow. Focusing in on him and how he personally handed it, dissecting his blog posts, etc, is just silly. Many of the blog posts, especially from the “A” list types, have that twinge of arrogance and smugness which is normally seen when the business of business turns into the blood sport of watching somebody fail.

We need to use care in beating up Zuckerberg and Facebook in general because we want these folks to push the limits of finding new ideas and trying to make sense out of all the data flowing everywhere. Try it and get some reactions, adjust, find the happy center, rinse and repeat. That’s what Facebook should be doing and all the users and give feedback about the business. If they go off sides, it will get corrected, it always does. If they do really bad things, people vote with the mouse clicks. Just ask MySpace or AOL’s GeoCities. People vote and have no problem moving.

Right. We can’t expect to see new companies innovating and taking chances without the chance that they make mistakes. Of course, they’ll make mistakes. The question is what they do about them. Zuckerberg and Facebook have done a good job listening to their public and correcting their mistakes and keeping the nerve to innovate and experiment. And they do it in the open.

Too often, companies and brands — especially media brands, I’ll add — try to act as if they’re perfect and they don’t make mistakes and they don’t want to risk their reputations by making any. This makes them timid and that kills innovation.

I’d rather have a company that tries to innovate and makes mistakes, so long as they listen and correct them. That, I believe, is the new way for companies to act. It works only if you are in a conversation with your customers and listen to them. And so far, Facebook has done that. So I agree with Segal. And I say, don’t be so quick to jump on or write off Zuckerberg and company. They’ve done a lot right so far. Could they make the Big Mistake that messes it all up? Sure. That’s what Plaxo did with me, spamming me to the point that I will never trust that brand or company again.

But so far, Facebook has learned from its mistakes. That’s the most I can ask from them.

Furthering my ruminations on the social airline….

Today’s NY Times writes about travel publishers still trying to figure out the web (they’ve been trying and failing to figure it out since the web’s start; I worked, frustratingly, with Fodor’s back in the ’90s as it tried to find a strategy). It says that among their tactics is licensing book content to airlines to display on their seat-back entertainment systems.

But that should be a two-way exchange. Airlines should capture the knowledge of their wise-about-traveling crowds. Imagine if, on return trips, the airlines asked us the hotels where we just stayed and ate and invited us to rate and review them. Imagine if they asked natives to share some inside tips on eating and shopping in their towns. They have a currency to pay for the information: They could reward us with frequent-flier bonus miles. Because they know who we are, they could even start to anonymously aggregate other data around this: ‘American Express Platinum customers recommend….’

The airlines would gather an incredible data base of live knowledge of real travelers with fresh knowledge. They’d outdo TripAdvisor over time. Or they could license their content to TripAdvisor or some of those travel publishers. The airlines could themselves become publishers by listening to and capturing and sharing the knowledge of their customers. But first, the an airline needs to think of itself as a platform for travel and of its customers as networks.

This should be a basic question of any company or industry in the internet era: ‘What do my customers know and how do I help them share that?’

: LATER: TravelWeekly is interested. So is book publisher Joe Wikert.

What if a plane flight were networked and became a social experience with its own economy?

For part of a book I’m finally starting to work on, I’ve been thinking about how companies and industries can be remade with Googlethink and social smarts (note how I’m not saying Web 2.0). It’s harder to reimagine some than others. The benefits of tearing apart and rebuilding cable companies are obvious. But I just about gave up on airlines, dooming them to their status as the new buses. What can one do with such a commodity service, and one that has deteriorated so badly?

Then I was inspired by Steve Baker at Business Week, who asked, “Why hasn’t aviation benefited more from Moore’s Law?” Maybe it’s not Moore’s law that can reform airlines but Jarvis’ First Law — give the people control and we will use it; don’t and you will lose us — and Zuckerberg’s commandment — give your people elegant organization — plus a bit of Googlethink about networks, platforms, and wise crowds. For Burda’s upcoming DLD event, one airline, Lufthansa, is asking what they should be in 15 years. Here’s one scenario of how they can change in far less time….

Start here: Most passengers on airlines today are connected to the internet on the ground and soon we will be in the air as airlines return to the idea of adding wireless internet to jets (see an AP roundup from yesterday here — I can’t wait). Getting us connected will be good for the airlines, not only because they have something new to sell — if they don’t try to gouge us — but also because we’ll be busy — engaged, entertained, connected — and less likely to grumble and revolt at delays. Busy passengers are happier passengers.

Once airplanes’ passengers are connected with the ground, that enables them to get connected with each other. It would be easy for the airlines — or, failing that, the passengers themselves — to set up social networks around flights and destinations. The possibilities are endless:

* At the simplest level, we could connect while in the air to set up shared cab rides once we land, saving passengers a fortune.

* We can ask our fellow passengers who live in or frequently visit a destination for their recommendations for restaurants, things to do, ways to get around.

* We can play games.

Note that this requires not only wifi internet access at a reasonable price but also electric plugs at every seat. The first airline to do this will gain the loyalty and appreciation of a huge number of wired road warriors.

* Now think back to the earliest 747s with their lounges where you could socialize with fellow passengers, something that still goes on even in the cramped quarters of today’s jets, though every inch is filled with a seat and though the cabin crew is less often the object of the flirting. The idea is coming back on Virgin and in the 787 Dreamliner and A380. So now imagine if on this onboard social network, you could find people you want to meet — people in the same business going to the same conference, people of similar interests, future husbands and wives — and you can rendezvous in the lounge.

* This is the key to decommodifying the airline: What if you chose to fly on one airline vs. another because you knew and liked the people better? What if the airline’s brand became its passengers? What if the airline even found ways to encourage more interesting people to fly with them because they knew that would attract and retain passengers (they could offer discounts and benefits to people who are active and popular in the social network)? Right now, all you offer is seats and miles: commodities. How much richer this would be if you offered small societies. Yes, we could still get stuck next to a talkative bozo — but not if we could meet people and arrange our seats before the flight thanks to the social network. Next to the right person, I might even tolerate a middle seat.

So these social networks should be opened before the flight. And that enables not only these on-flight connections but also a new economy:

* The airline can set up an auction marketplace for at least some of the seats: What’s it worth for you to fly to Berlin next Wednesday? You could bid and buy a seat from a passenger who already holds one. This could solve some of the airlines’ overbooking problem and reduce the cost of bumping customers if late-booking passengers can buy seats from fellow passengers in an open marketplace. You can bet that once a social network around a flight exists, we’ll compare what we paid. So why not be open? Yes, speculators could arbitrage seats, but so long as they’re nonrefundable, what problem is that for the airline? They become market makers. Besides, this sets a new market value for seats that in some cases will be higher than the airlines’ existing fares.

* The airline could also use this to predict and maximize load. What if there’s a sudden surge in demand for a destination the airline can see because bids appear in an auction marketplace for a certain route around certain dates (because of a new conference or festival or good media coverage for a new getaway or bargain)? The airline can add capacity, which keeps the airlines in control over arbitrageurs; the airline is always in control of supply and now it would know more about demand. Similarly, what if a flight is light and the airline starts offering passengers alternatives at great discounts to enable the airline to cancel a flight and reroute the equipment long before departure? The airline increases efficiency and profitability; the passengers get a dividend; and the environment gets a break. These things can be done in an open and flexible marketplace.

* While you’re at it, why not turn frequent-flier miles into an open market? In miles, the airlines have created a virtual currency with far greater reach and value than those on Second Life or Facebook. But they’re essentially illiquid. The airlines make it impossible to get frequent-flier seats with them unless you’re flying to Krakow on Christmas Day a decade hence. And the other deals they offer us — use your miles to buy a TV — are bad deals. This, in turn, devalues the virtual currency to the point that it offers an ever-decreasing incentive to choose one airline over another; it no longer acts as the decommodifier the airlines intended. So open it up: Let us bid on frequent flier seats with our miles. Let us trade and barter our miles with each other — I’ll sell you this iPod for miles I want to use to get my vacation. This will again add value to the currency.

* The main reason we go for miles today is to get silver or greater status so we can jump lines and board first. But I’m not in control of how much I travel; my employers are. So what you really want is my loyalty; you want a large marketshare of me. So let me earn privileges in other ways. Open this up, too. Let me bid miles or money for these benefits: create a market value for boarding first.

* The airline should find ways to involve employees in the network. They can also offer tips. They are the airline’s representatives to the community. And the airline should want to learn more about its employees through the network. Those who make the flight more pleasant and more social are an asset and should be rewarded. Besides, it’s hard to get nasty with cabin crews when you feel as if you know them.

* The airlines can also learn a great deal about their service from the network of passengers. We’ll tell you about the food and what’s worth paying for. I’ll start a movement to save my knees from the bozos who slam their seats into them. You’ll see which employees are your best marketers.

There are many subtleties to this. For example, in some cases, I won’t want to reveal my true identity (telling people I’m out of town), for others I will (doing business). If seats are being traded, real identities and credit cards must be in the system for security. And so on. But this would be easy to pull off with existing social software (Ning, Drupal) and links to existing social networks (Facebook, Linkedin) and existing auction markets (a walled-in eBay). The beauty is that no marketing is required; you’re simply serving, connecting, and organizing the customers you already have. Yet this act alone rebrands you as the social airline. (Better get there quick, before Virgin does.)

So brainstorm with employees and passengers. Imagine what it takes to be the open, social airline — a platform for travel — and then imagine the good that comes of it. Your customers will give you value if you trust them and let them.

: LATER: Ross twitters: “the social airline already exists, try the last flight to Vegas on a Friday night.”

A dozen huge companies — including Dell, Microsoft, General Motors, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Nokia, Wells Fargo — have just started a corporate Blog Council.

I’m glad that these big guys have embraced blogging. But I have one bit of advice for them:

Change the name now.

It’s not about blogging. I hate to call on the obvious platitude, but I will: It’s a conversation.

When I was in London, I sat with folks from the BBC in an afternoon devoted to blogging, and the woman next to me was troubled, bearing weight on her shoulders from having to fill her blog and manage her blog. To her, the blog was a thing, a beast that needed to be fed, a never-ending sheet of blank paper. I turned to her and said she should see past the blog. It’s not a show with a rundown that, without feeding, turns into dead air. Indeed, if you look at it that way, you’ll probably write crappy blog posts. I’ve said before that if I think I need to write a post just because I haven’t written one, I inevitably come out with something forced and bad. Instead, I blog when I find something interesting that I’ve seen and I think, ‘I have to tell my friends about that.’ You’re the friends. So yes, I said, it’s just a conversation. And reading — hearing what others are saying — is every bit as important as writing. It was as if scales were lifted from her eyes and weight from her back: She’s just talking with people.

And that is how I think the Blog Council should look at this: It’s not about them writing blog posts. It as much about them reading everybody else’s blog posts. And, besides, there are all kinds of new tools for the conversation: Twitter, Pownce, YouTube, Facebook, Dell’s IdeaStorm, and more being invented in dorm rooms coast-to-coast.

The other problem is that the language on the Council site is much about marketing — marketing to us. That’s understandable because these are marketing guys and it’s also likely true because this is being run by a leader in the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, a group whose existence and name has given me the willies. It implies that they can manage our mouths when, indeed, that’s the one thing that we, the customers, are fully in charge of. If they truly realize that we, the customers, are in charge, then that changes the way you comport yourself in this conversation. Again, you listen more than you speak.

So have the Council. Not a bad idea. But I suggest you call it the Conversation Council. Or better yet, the Listening Council. That alone would say as much as the best blog post.

: Guardian Unlimited’s Jemima Kiss is also cautious but open:

I remain a little sceptical, not least because I haven’t seen a corporate blog I’m really “wowed” with yet. But with a bit of luck, that’s what the Blog Council will serve up.

Alec Saunders is a big cynical about it, speculating that this is really about Googlejuice. There are other benefits. He concludes:

Good heavens, people! Get a grip! You don’t need a cozy little exclusive club to figure out what to do with blogs. Just get on the net, start talking to your customers and advocates, and start interacting with people outside the strictures of twentieth century command and control marketing. Council, Shmouncil!

Similar advice here from Scoble.

Dell blogger Lionel Menchaca says:

It’s also not about control. For me at least, that has been decided—companies don’t control the message, customers do. I hope that Dell (and other companies in the council that have made the leap into digital media) can work together to move companies past the false notion that we are still in control. I’ve talked to folks from other large companies and that reality scares the heck out of them. I think that’s the primary reason why less than 10% of Fortune 500 companies have a blog. That fear makes it a non-starter for many companies. . . .

Good corporate blogs force companies to look at things from a customer’s point of view. That’s why I want more large corporations to blog, and I want them to do it the right way. That means letting real people have real conversations just like individual blogs do. But it’s a bit different from a corporate perspective. Transparency is still key, but the reality for large corporations is that there are some things we can’t discuss. It’s a balancing act, and sometimes it’s a difficult one. But worth the risk? You bet it is.

: Disclosures: Last week, I spoke at GM (for pay) and I now know the blog team at Dell (where, of course, I have no commercial relationship).