For the first time in eight years, BIGfish doesn’t have a team member on the ground at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. As advanced and incredible as technology is today, mother nature still rules. After a Nor’easter hit New England hard late last week, a “polar vortex” swept the nation, leaving runways icy and flight crew members overworked and too tired to fly. More than 3,000 flights were cancelled industry-wide on Monday and our carrier, JetBlue, cancelled flights throughout the weekend, then completely shut down for 17 hours from Monday afternoon to Tuesday morning.

Known for its strong social media strategy, JetBlue did a good job of responding to stranded customers via Twitter during this crisis. After her flight was cancelled, BIGfish team member, Meredith, tweeted at JetBlue and received a reply 20 minutes later. Although the end result was obviously not ideal, JetBlue was honest, timely and informative with their responses.

JetBlue also offered a fee waiver for customers flying out of the northeast and brought in extra greeters to help passengers (finally) leaving from Logan Airport. However, an unrelated promoted tweet was pinned to the top of their feed during the first few days of cancellations. Since JetBlue is a verified account, their @replies are automatically hidden from their timeline (unless you click to view “All” tweets), meaning this promoted tweet made JetBlue seem even more out of touch. We think JetBlue should have taken this down as soon as things took a turn for the worse. Better late than never, JetBlue replaced the promoted tweet with a more appropriate post on Monday morning, linking to an “operational update” on their blog.

So far in 2014, Mother Nature is calling the shots.
Our Monday operational update: http://t.co/xVtrD4ZfYH

— JetBlue (@JetBlue) January 6, 2014

On the bright side, we’ve been in CES prep mode for months and everything is in place for our client, TYLT, who attended Pepcom’s Digital Experience last night and will be exhibiting on the CES show floor all week. Since November, the BIGfish team has been hard at work targeting and pitching key reporters and providing our clients with the resources and information they need to be successful with our without us at the show – and that we are proud of!

Now that CES has started, we’re keeping lines of communication open with our clients in Las Vegas and are preparing as much as possible for follow ups next week. We’re also following #CES2014, @IntlCES and our favorite reporters on Twitter, watching live streams, and reading every article about new products and events at the show.

So far, it seems like the CES predictions of curved screens, connected cars, cheaper 4K TVs and more 4K content have proved to be true. Some of our favorite stories and products so far are:

• Mashable: Toyota Shows Off Fuel Cell Vehicle, Powered by Hydrogen, Air

• WIRED: Google Partners With Automakers to bring Android to the Car

• USA Today: Twitter co-founder launches social search engine Jelly

• Engadget: Take that Samsung: LG’s got a 77-inch OLED UHD TV that bends on command (video)

We can’t wait to see what else is uncovered at #CES2014 this year! Stay tuned for more of our favorite things from the largest consumer electronics show in the world.