www.ChrisLaBossiere.com

If you were following along on Twitter last week, you may have seen a few tweets from me that were born out of frustration from a lost suitcase as I arrived in Phoenix for the NOCA conference. I don't travel well, and like most everyone, lose my patience quickly when it comes to airlines. 

So when standing at the luggage carousel and watching the last bag circle and quickly realizing that it was a dead-ringer for my bag, but wasn't my bag, you can quickly guess what had happened. Another person had inadvertently taken mine instead of theirs.

So I started to think of ways to find the person who had my bag. I tweeted back to Edmonton to see if anyone might have known the person who's name was on the bag. Unfortunately no one was able to help, and a claim was made with WestJet to start the search for my bag. Now, I was faced with the challenge of having to be working in a trade show booth the next morning, without even a change of clothes. So off to the mall I went the next morning.

This is where the fun started. I made a tweet out of frustration that WestJet should repay me for the $150 I had to spend on the change of clothes, however not to me directly, but to sponsor my efforts to raise money for Prostate Canada in their Movember campaign. I have been growing a silly moustache to raise money, and didn't honestly expect any response.

What happened next, was a perfect indication of how WestJet gets social media, and perhaps better yet, how their employees really care about their customers. That same day I was contacted by the WestJet communications person behind their Twitter account, and they were proposing to re-raise my challenge. Due to corporate limitations for sponsorship, the company simply couldn't sponsor my 'Stache', but the communications group at WestJet happened to be also participating in the Movember initiative.

What was really cool was that although the corporate limitation was in place, the team wanted to do something. They did some simple online research and found that our company, Yardstick Software, also had a team raising money, growing moustaches, and took up a collection for the cause. But in their fun own way, they proposed something different. They proposed a challenge between the WestJet Moustache Crew, and our own Yardstache Crew. They would "Tweet" out to their 10,000 Twitter followers the challenge, and asked them to go to each team and "Rate" the moustaches of each member. The moustache with the best rating, would get the cash collected by the WestJet team. We gladly accepted the challenge, and agreed to match the donation to the winning 'stache.

This embodies to me how companies can use Social Media to create a relationship with their customers. It also demonstrated to me that they really get how to use the real-time search functionality of Twitter to listen to their customers. It also showed me that the company gets the true personal nature of the tool and empowers employees to do the right thing, without strict guidelines on how to do that.

My hat's off to the fun people behind the WestJet account, and their very real commitment to the community and customers who fly their airline. If you're not following @WestJet on Twitter, give them a follow. They rock.