Background: Saturday, Southwest Air kicked Kevin Smith off a plane for being too fat. Smith took to Twitter to complain. As of press time, he has not stopped. Southwest Air’s PR team has toned down their apologies and started defending themselves. And so far, we’ve learned these lessons:
1. If you are a wealthy Hollywood director with three films on the way, and you like your space but still like to mingle with the hoi polloi, please at least spring for business class.
2. If you are an airline, any airline, please be careful what you do to celebrities, even if you weren’t aware they often bitch in public.
3. If you are an airline, any airline, teach your employees to be really careful with that “too fat to fly” rule, because honestly, you’re just begging for bad PR in a nation of lardos.
4. Fat people shouldn’t fly.
5. If you’ve been wronged by a company, it’s normal to make a stink. But you’ll only get so much pity. Eventually you need to forgive them, show you’re the better person, and accept that they’ve learned their lesson. If not, you lose your moral high ground – and the PR battle.
6. If you exploit your celebrity status to make a stink about something, you’re not allowed to yell at anyone for helping you out because you’re a celebrity. Take the goddamn voucher and stop being a baby.
7. Realize when you’re about to be better known for spending your weekend bitching out an airline, than for making movies. On second thought, maybe you looked at your recent movies and made this decision on purpose.
8. When you apologize to a customer, leave it at that. Stop defending yourself. You don’t blog “hey, but he usually buys two seats” – which was apparently private info until now. You leak those dirty details to the press while in public you act contrite and don’t make excuses. What idiot is running your PR department, Steve Rubel?
9. Throw the flight attendants under the bus! Unless that’s a mixed metaphor.
10. Don’t boycott an entire company because one person screwed up, then defend yourself by pointing at the company’s response to your silly threat.
11. Don’t write long blog posts broken into Twitter updates, breaking in the middle of sentences like a schoolchild trying to fit your entire speech onto one 3×5 notecard. This is what blogs are for. If your blog doesn’t have any readers, it’s because no one wants to hear more than 140 characters from you at a time.
12. Sarah Silverman is funnier than you.
13. If I always fly Southwest, I’ll never have to watch “Jersey Girl” in-flight.
