I think the sad part about this thread is that Ansett felt obliged to withdraw the contents of the PM from Red Roo explaining the official company response to the issues raised by Ansett. Fortunately I happened to be lucky and was able to read and digest the contents of Red Roos perfectly reasonable response, which was probably about as good as possible in the circumstances. Given that there were no specific staff mentioned, nor or any commercial confidence information given out by Red Roo, plus the fact that Ansett clearly raised the issue and was making the effort to inform members here on AFF about any possible resolution it seems a little strange that the thread played out this way.
Given that we all understand that Red Roo is an official company representative and would have to operate under their own constraints and procedures about what they can and cannot say. Without the explanation from Red Roo to the original query - we have a very lengthy, delayed, occasionally off-topic and speculative thread without any resolution. In my mind - that's a PR fail from Qantas's point of view and a waste of Red Roo's and indeed Ansett's time and effort. Cue thread staying open......
Seems a curious and almost self-defeating form of PR and social media engagement where a perfectly reasonable, vetted and approved apology and explanation (with all the prerequisite effort that would have gone into the response) to then try to hide that response from the public and members here of AFF.
I completely agree...
Social media 101 (this forum counts in this context), unlike other forms of advertising, the advertising company does not own the content or the messages. It can only influence them. Whilst there is always trolling which happens, eg the "Qantas Sucks and I haven't flown them since 1982" type posts which can be ignored (as is often shown, AFF members will tear those posts apart in seconds), the notion that an airline representative can't actively engage in a negative discussion shows that Qantas both really don't like social media (who can blame them) and that they really don't trust their social media representatives (sorry people behind the Red Roo account).
For social media to be "managed" it really needs to be thought of in terms of poking and prodding into the right direction. Just recently I was asked for my input for a certain organisations twitter strategy. What we came up with was pretty much guidelines on how to respond to certain types of tweets, with an emphasis on responding to both good and bad quickly (with exception to the obvious trolls).
The basic idea is the longer negative feeling is left to fester, the worse the company looks, just look at this thread. A few quick posts by Red Roo could have stopped the post count going out of control in the early stages. Something as simple as we'll investigate and get back to you at this time, and then make sure that you post something, anything, even if it's "look, this is a little more complex than we'd hoped, we're still looking into it" would mean that Red Roo would influence the discussion, rather than simply ignoring, hoping this will go away, and then give an answer which was not to be made public, thus leaving this thread to keep going and doing it's damage.
As I said, I don't think this is Red Roo's fault, I think it's a marketing department whom hasn't really gotten it's head around the fact that it's no longer the 1980's, and old school advertising can't be your only advertising.
Some-one here has called Qantas and has been told that its always available :shock: . You, serfty and all the others who have reported 'not available sometimes' are all in it together, right? 
