I thought about American Airline’s recent PR blunder the other day. The airline company took a pre-emptive strike and boldly announced they will now be charging customers a $15 surcharge for transporting each piece of luggage for their trip. Well that piece of news made the headlines on tv, radio, print and online, and needless to say, it was not well received. Travelers are already being hit with airport fees, additional security fees and rising ticket prices, the $15 per bag charge is hardly trivial, especially if you’re taking your family on vacation. Yet the reality is that prices everywhere are rising due to runaway gas prices. It’s typical for manufacturers and suppliers to pass the costs on to consumers; and lately, rising costs across the board are the norm these days. Clearly, the amount of fuel airlines require to operate their planes is skyrocketing and consumers are well aware of this fact. As consumers, we would have expected to see and pay for higher ticket prices. Are other airlines likely to follow American’s move? I doubt it. What they will do and what American should have done is build the additional fee into the price of the ticket. That move would have been far more palatable with the public. I’m unsure what type of PR advise American was given or whether they decided to decline it; now, their efforts to find new ways to boost revenues may have backfired. It will be interesting to see if they reverse their decision and how it takes them.

Twitter and the world of micro-blogging is in its early days and we believe will become an influential messaging tool that will gain broad user and business adoption. It’s power is in its ability to tap into and push short snippets of information into the public ether. As we mentioned in an early post, titled How to Get Your Twitter On, there are a bevy of new, useful Web 2.0 tools tailored around support the growing world of Twitterers, which is about 1 million.

Here are a few more uber cool tools that we wanted to highlight.
Summize: is a newly launched start-up that enables real-time Twitter searches that let you get a temperature check on what people are tweeting related to a particular topic. I was recently trying to find the latest information on the Florida brush fire that was rapidly moving toward my mom’s house in Malabar. I tried to manually find more information about the fire in Twitter, but trying Summize I pulled up a rich list of updates. Here’s more results we found on the big Santa Cruz County fire that broke out yesterday, which is just a stone’s throw away from Silicon Valley. For Marketing & PR folks out there monitoring perceptions about a technology, product or company, check out Summize Labs which is a nifty feature that gives you an interesting real-time Twitter sentiment ranging from great to wretched.

Here’s a cool new service for music called: Blip. Launched by San Francisco-based parent company Fuzz, the Blip service lets users search and hear song tracks and also share them with friends via Twitter. It’s nice to see other startups innovating to enable Twitter to become more able to share rich media. Blip has a simple UI. Trying out the service, I was finally able to find the song in the recent Kia commercial that I like (Can’t Get It Right Today – Joe Purdy).

The next major mobile opportunity is already bubbling below the surface and will be a user shift from SMS to mobile IM. RCR Wireless wrote a recent piece on the changing landscape and the challenges it will create for carriers that will see their once growing SMS revenues decline as users begin to adopt mobile IM instead. According to the Radicati Group, the installed base of online IM fans is already 1.2 billion and is pegged to grow to 1.9 billion over the next four years. However, mobile IM also offers an expanded horizon of revenue opportunities for carriers to put together attractive service offerings that incorporate social networking, communities, blogging, and interactivity with other mobile media.

Currently, mobile IM is used by only 8% of mobile consumers worldwide, according to TNS Global Telecoms. Undoubtedly, mobile IM (MIM) will leave SMS in the dust and for good reason: its free, its faster and the availability and emergence of powerful, cross-platform tools such as those from mobile communications innovator Geodesic* are porting popular desktop-based messaging and communication functionality to the mobile phone. (Currently about 15% of iPhone users use Geodesic’s Mundu IM universal iPhone edition tool.)

While the mobile landscape change is well underway, it bodes well for the ecosystem: mobile communications service providers that are pioneering enhanced tools for users; carriers once they figure out new business models that will be successful and appeal to users; and users who will be the ultimate winners as they will have bigger, better, faster ways to create, consume and communicate with their own network of friends and family.

(Full disclosure: Geodesic is a client of Ignite PR.)