Kevin Smith – filmmaker, blogger, and self-professed “big fat-ass” – missed his Monday flight on Virgin America, prompting him to go online with more airline troubles. Smith was famously removed from a Southwest flight earlier this year for allegedly being “too fat to fly.”

In this case, Smith says on his blog (the post has the tacky title “Virgin shuts its legs, I shut my wallet”) that he had first-class tickets, arrived at JFK with his wife an hour early, and had a concierge to escort them to the gate when it was time to board. Still, the Virgin America gate agent denied Smith and his wife entry to the plane.

Read more

Altimeter Group partner and technology columnist Michael Gartenberg closed out mediabistro.com’s Think Mobile conference this week with a discussion titled, “Social Ubiquity: The Disruption When Mobile and Social Networks Intersect.”

Gartenberg explained–for better or worse–mass adoption of smart phones has created a “social ubiquity,” causing the need for brands to not only monitor social networks, but have a strategy to respond in real time:

If you have a brand and you’re not monitoring what’s being said about your brand in real-time, you’re making a mistake. But it’s not just having the information — you have to be able to respond instantly, and you have to be able to respond in real-time. Eventually, the voices of 100 million start to show truth.

For the PR profession, the funnel of word-of-mouth information has changed drastically. Once upon a time, mainstream media was the driving force behind discussions at the water cooler.

Now, as Gartenberg explained, consumers’ social network relationships and recommendations from people they don’t know can drive decisions, and “now include real-time information, contextual data, social factors beyond the physical sphere of influence and reach — information that is always available, always on, persistent, and in-pocket.”

The recent Tweet-flap between filmmaker Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines was used as example du jour.

MobileContentToday and its Twitter feed have more information on the Think Mobile conference.

Another day, another social media kerfuffle. This time it’s film director Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy) and Southwest Airlines.

Smith [pictured right] was kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight because he was deemed a “safety risk.” The real reason: Smith is too big to fit into one seat.

He knows this, and usually buys two seats on Southwest, since the tickets are so cheap. However, this weekend he got onto an earlier flight where he only had one seat, and then was asked to leave the flight after boarding.

Smith went public with his gripes on Twitter, the media picked it up, and now social media and PR types are blogging away. Despite all of the commotion, we’ll make an educated guess: Southwest Airlines doesn’t really care about any of this.

Here’s why…

Read more