Southwest Airlines Case Study – Module 2

   1.     Press releases are important to Southwest’s business strategy because they tend to appear in news aggregate services like AOL, Yahoo, and Google. Southwest can make the release a relevant search result by embedding certain keywords and search phrases within the document. When the document is then picked up by a search service, they open potential exposure to more than 47.6 million potential visitors.

   2.     Southwest tracks sales related to press releases by:

a.       Utilizing effective keywords and search terms within the document.

b.     Using special hyperlinks that are trackable and easy to use.

c.      Distributing their releases across news aggregates crawled by search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo, AOL.)

   3.     Keywords are vital to the campaign because they make sure that the document will appear once the search engine crawls it, and a relevant search term is entered. For example, Southwest found that they could actually reach millions more customers by using their entire name, “Southwest Airlines,” because there were millions more searches for that two word term verses the shorter, one-word term, Southwest.

   4.     Southwest optimized their press releases by:

a.     Determining the most popular keywords/search terms.

                                               i.     i.e. Southwest Airlines vs. Southwest

b.     Editing said releases to include those terms.

c.      Using specialized, trackable hyperlinks that linked the customer directly to the offer mentioned.

d.     Distributing their press releases via crawlable news wires (i.e. Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc.)

e.     Testing a variety of releases, (i.e. different promos, news, or languages.)

   5.     Southwest primarily measured the results in terms of how they translated to ticket sales using three different releases:

a.     Launching in a new city

                                               i.     Translated to 80k in ticket sales.

b.     Launching a Spanish-language reservation system

                                               i.     Translated to 38k in ticket sales.

c.      Having several releases at once (some unexpected).

                                               i.     Translated to more than 1M in ticket sales due to increased news coverage.

   6.     PR campaigns can be influenced in all sorts of ways from outside sources. For example,  General Mills used to say that Cheerios were clinically proven to lower cholesterol, until they were sued to the contrary – now the ads parse the language and state that Cheerios MAY help lower cholesterol despite the fact that the lawsuit was tossed out of court. For more details, see this link:  http://www.attorneyatlaw.com/2009/10/lawsuits-over-cheerios-cholesterol-lowering-claims-consolidated/

      At the very least, the suit initiated a change in message at GMI.