Last week I wrote about having the opportunity to teach some talented people about blogging. Now, we can talk about our project. Presenting: Nuts About Southwest, the airline industry’s first corporate blog.

The people at Southwest have been dreaming up the blog for quite a while now, and brought RD2 in a few months ago to share our experience in blogging, web design, and development.

One of our recommendations was the use of WordPress to run the blog. It was an easy recommendation to make: we use WordPress on this blog, it is robust, and it was easily customizable for some special needs. For example, Southwest needed a user level that would leave all posts in draft mode, yet allow for uploading of photos. With WordPress’ default setup, you can have one or the other. With some quick searching, I located the Role Manager plug-in, which lets admins configure user capabilities simply.

After our team built out the site, I went out to Southwest’s campus near Love Field and taught a boardroom full of people, most who had only heard of blogging because of being tapped for this effort, how to use WordPress to blog. It was a fun hour, full of questions about blogging and jokes about what types of posts would work for the site. All in all, it was a great look into the potential that this blog has. The room was full of talented, creative, and gregarious people who love working for Southwest and are excited to share it with Southwest’s current and potential customers.

I’m very proud of our collaboration in the two blogs RD2 has built for Southwest: the Adopt-A-Pilot Blog and Nuts About Southwest. It will be fun to watch this new blog take off.