Down the chute

Life's complicated, in case you haven't noticed.

Even for a company that has done everything right building a user- friendly reputation for its brand. Doing the right thing day after day, in the eyes of customers, is the best way to create a reservoir of goodwill that is so valuable when a crisis hits.

Today Jet Blue is all over the news because one of its flight attendants, fed up with rude passengers, left his post in dramatic fashion Monday, escaping down the evacuation slide at New York's JFK Airport. Not since D.B. Cooper, and $200,000 in ransom money, went out the hatch of a 727 over southwestern Washington in 1971 has the exit from a plane been such news.

While the airline is being cut considerable slack in the media and on the Internet, it has come in for some criticism for its silence on the social media circuit. After earning a reputation as a thought leader in the development of its social media presence, the company has apparently failed in its response to the incident to live up to the standards expected of it. In other words, to this point, the company has said nothing on Facebook, Twitter or elsewhere. The general take seems to be that the Jet Blue legal department has pulled the plug on the social media department, at least for now.

The whole episode just goes to show how new all of this form of communications is, and how difficult it is, in the short run, to mitigate the risks involved in opening up to the cyber world.

Our guess is that Jet Blue will be just fine, drawing on that reservoir of goodwill and continuing to have online conversations with its customers.