Southwest Airlines today very quietly launched their own community and took their social media activities to a new level. The community is accessed through a new tab in the top-level navigation named “Travel Guide”.

In the Travel Guide section users can share travel tips, rate and review destinations, hotels, attractions etc., upload photos and discuss travel experiences in forums.

Features and design are typically Southwest – nothing edgy, no bells and whistles, nothing that we have not seen before, but a very, very solid execution. And Southwest is not afraid what customers have to say: the forum even includes a section where travel on Southwest can discussed – who needs Flyertalk.com.

So far the community is very thin on content and members – Southwest did obviously feel it was not necessary to create a lot of content in stealth mode before opening it to the public. And they are probably right because now that the site is live the content should grow pretty quickly.

Southwest joins a whole group of other airlines that have rolled out community / social networking sites but this takes the game to a new level and raises a lot of new questions.

A community of 100,000,000
Southwest Airlines had more than 100 million enplaned passengers in 2008.

That is a nice pool to tap into when you want to start a community. Obviously enplaned passengers are not unique passengers but even if Southwest has only 50 million unique passengers and manages to entice 1% of those to join the community will have 500,000 members. 5% would mean 2.5 million in the Southwest social network. This is a game changer when it comes to social travel websites.

Content screening
I could not resist to create some content and to my surprise it went live right away. No pre-screening or other delay. Of course content can be flagged by user but overall this is a bold move for a brand like Southwest. It will be interesting to see how the airline will handle self-promotions by hotels and restaurants through “reviews”. And as adding content requires only a registered profile but not entering a CAPTCHA code it is currently pretty easy to write a robot program and create spam messages. Not difficult to remove but still a pain.

Ancillary revenue
Southwest is not getting into the community business because they love social media so much. With their own community they can now do something they can not do on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr or any other social media sites they are currently using: they can make money. Not totally unimportant if you are an airline in these days.
How will they make the money? Look at this from a SEO perspective alone. Lots and lots of content will be created and the Google spider will come and visit over and over again. Search for a Las Vegas hotel review and you might see a Southwest Airlines Travel Guide instead of Tripadvisor. But wait, there is more! Take the traffic and monetize it with ads. But not just any ads – use the additional data you have collected about member interests during the sign-up process for some targeting. Your favorite destination is San Diego? Have a look at this – coincidentally a special deal from your hometown to Southern California. Oh the possibilities …

Pressure on airlines
The Southwest community is overall pretty unsophisticated as far as the features go: no good search engine, just simple Google maps, very few “social” tools to connect with other members etc. But the fact that Southwest as the social media leader in the airline space (Blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr) has decided to roll out a community – as simple as it is – adds significant pressure on other carriers to follow suit. Virgin Atlantic will roll out their Vtravelled community in June. They will not be the last.

Pressure on destinations and DMOs
Other airlines are not the only ones that will feel the pressure. As a Southwest customer I will soon be able to get travel insights and user-generated-content on Southwest.com. One less reason to go to a DMO (destination marketing organization) website. One more website the DMO has to screen to stay on top of what visitors are saying about the destination.
Overall social networking micro-sites are growing rapidly (this is just another example). Each of these travel-themed micro-sites makes online life for the DMO more complicated.

Consumers want to share and connect and if DMOs do not offer the right tools and the right content consumers will find it elsewhere. Southwest Airlines is a powerhouse when it comes to tourism marketing in the US. The content created on Southwest.com has the potential to shape travel decisions similar to what Tripadvisor has done for hotels. Few DMOs can afford to stand on the sideline while this is happening. They must – and will – offer consumers their own alternative for the content they are seeking – ratings, reviews, photos, videos etc.

As we do every month we list all destinations that are using Twitter and rank them using Twitter Grader.

February brought many changes to our ranking including a new Nr. 1: @BaltimoreMD put – literally – a lot of skin in the game, became the first destination with more than 3,000 followers and moved up to the top spot.

Congratulations to Tom and everybody else in Baltimore!

If you have not followed the “fail whale” tattoo story, you can read up on it here and also see a video of the “fail whale” finding it’s home on a nicely shaved leg. A must read for anybody who wants to see another great example of how to create a buzz with social media.

@VisitChicago and @TravelPortland (disclosure: we manage that account) also broke through 3,000 followers. @TravelPortland gained a lot more followers through the PR and attention created for the Portland Twisitor Center and @VisitChicago is just lucky to have somebody managing the account who really gets social media.

We will have a separate blog post later this week to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of trying to get as many followers as possible (a topic that has cause good debate in the past).

Overall we are now tracking more than 208 destinations in the US and Canada.

Here is the ranking for destinations as of February 28th. For some destinations grader did not return results so we estimated the grade (those grades are in italics).

As usual please let us know who we are missing, @anneh632 already found 5 new destinations on Twitter. Please keep them coming.

Also, if you destination is not yet listed on TwisitorCenter.com please follow the account so we can follow back and your destinations will show up on the map with destinations that twitter.