American carrier Southwest Airlines celebrated its one-year anniversary since the launch of its business blog on Friday (April 27th).
The Fortune 500 company was the first airline to offer customers a blog and claims it has now grown into a keystone of its customer service operations.
In order to give a fair representation of the firm, Nuts About Southwest is written by almost 30 of the company's employees including mechanics, flight attendants, pilots and the chief executive Gary Kelly.
Southwest Airlines president Colleen Barrett said: "Blogging works for us because, as a company, we know we have nothing to hide.
"Our employees absolutely ooze authenticity and our bloggers have been able to bring that same spirit to the blog.
"Just as our station and in-flight employees develop personal relationships with their frequent customers, our bloggers have developed personal relationships with customers they have met on the blog."
She added: "It takes time to build a trusting audience in the blogosphere. As we celebrate our first anniversary, we can see that we are really starting to build a strong online community."
To date, Nuts About Southwest has featured 265 posts and generated more than 6,300 comments. The most popular post was written by the CEO Gary Kelly on the controversial topic of assigned seating.
