Would you believe it? Only a few days ago, while releasing the case-pack for the Best Airlines Driving Customer Service and Crisis Management we had reported that the total votes for the 2nd SimpliFlying Awards for Excellence in Social Media had crossed 12,000 in just about a week! We also mentioned how votes had been received from more than 2,500 cities across the world. But today, we have updated figures for you, and we request you to hold your breath!
With about a day still to go for voting (and trust us, a lot of votes come in on the last day), the total number of votes has already crossed 30,000. Moreover, votes have come in from 4500+ cities across the world. How incredibly awesome is that?
Yes, while you gather words and your breath to answer that, this would be a good time to remind you that only a day is left for voting so you can still vote for your favorite airline if you haven’t done so. Do vote if you care about the airline you love! Meanwhile, you can check out the latest result for the current category below. All voting closes September 15….

 

After all the clamour regarding social media and how it’s the next big thing, we’re finally beginning to see some sense emanating from all the noise. Until now, there was an overwhelming feeling that what brands (among them airlines) really wanted out of social media was vague: there was no real consensus on what social media could actually do. It was mostly an unexplored quagmire that might yield riches or the swamp monsters. However, after an initial couple of years of experimentation, it’s quite evident that there are indeed riches to be gained from this quagmire. The bad news? There’s a monster protecting that treasure!
The Turning Tide
Undoubtedly, social media offers many benefits versus traditional forms of engagement. Some of them do bear repetition: the near-instant form of communication; two-way interaction compared to broadcast messaging; the ability to spread messages very fast across networks; the potential to identify and target “brand advocates” to drive brand awareness in cults (see Cult Relationship Management). We’ve strived to point out that a presence on social is media is not sufficient to do wonders for the brand: given that almost every airline is now on social media (our Monthly Airlines on Twitter report …

 

It’s the long weekend in many countries. Canada, US, most of Asia-Pacific are on a holiday. Yet, it’s very nice to see that airlines are listening. Chris Brogan tweeted today that he’d pay JetBlue $7,200 for one year of unlimited flying “pass”. And @JetBlue immediately replied that they’re “listening”.     Somewhere else on Twitterland, Christi Day of Southwest Airlines was dealing with an outburst from @TheKevinSmith, on Valentine’s Day eve, which finally involved Southwest’s VP calling Smith personally. Though these may seem like normal twitter conversations, to me they reflect a paradigm shift in the way airlines have started to deal with their customers. It wasn’t too long ago, where I had to print out and post a letter to an airline for a missed-connection claim, because their email inbox was full! And the matter took over 5mths to get resolved (in the end, I didn’t get my $$). JetBlue and …

 

So you and your team have been driving social media strategy at your airline or airport for over six months. You’ve managed to get over 5,000 fans on Facebook, you Tweet regularly, may be even have an iPhone app and have a ton of proposals already in mind to implement. Awesome! Now, what?You do realize that it’s the in-flight experience that makes or breaks a customer relationship, right? How do you make their in-flight experience an unforgettable one using social media? And then how do you get them to talk about it? Well, here are 5 ways to do that: 1. Use a unique Hashtag for the flight Aim: Improve customer experience Why not include a hashtag for each flight number with the booking confirmation? It can be something simple, such as #0311JB1263 (March 11th, Jet Blue flight #1263). That way, when people send a tweet saying they just booked a flight, or are heading to the airport, they use that hashtag, and then can search for others using the same hashtag. Passengers can make their own arrangements to meet up at the gate, share a …

 

Twitter is the latest rage, and companies are flocking to it in hordes. Half of Fortune 100 companies are already on Twitter. Helping put some order to the chaos is Jesse Engle’s CoTweet – a startup that has caught the eye of big Twitter corporate players like Ford and JetBlue. CoTweet helps frontline staff collaborate in real-time conversations with the customers. And it comes packed with workflow and CRM-type tools.
How can airlines tame Twitter?
Twitter is different when it comes to branding and connecting with your customers. Twitter is all about earning the right to be heard, as opposed to putting a list of people together and sending them an email. And this is why a number of brands struggle with it.

When I met Jesse at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston last month, I thought he’d be the best person to talk about how airlines can get on-board this latest craze and actually master it. And he sure obliged to my request.

Watch the full interview (8:30 mins) to hear Jesse explain:

How airlines with little money or resources can get started on Twitter (1:07)
How to set up an initial team to handle Twitter (1:30)
How to listen well …

 

I’ve been seeing a lot of airlines jump into social media lately – especially on Twitter. But once they do that, most of them run around like a headless chicken – or at least that how it appears to the outsider viewer. Let me share with you a couple of examples.

Emirates Airlines – which pitches itself as one of the best in the world, joined Twitter at the start of the year, and posted 19 updates about their destinations – all on the same day (see pic below). And at the other end of the spectrum, JetBlue does quite a good job of engaging over half a million of its followers with a mix of witty remarks, contests and deals. But all of them seem to be figuring out what to do. So here’s an analogy that might explain things a little.

Why Social Media = BBQ Cookout Party
At a BBQ cookout party, people are with those they trust, with those they consider friends. They give advice, seek advice (often on BBQ cooking), share thoughts and stories, laugh a little and have fun. What they DO NOT do …

 

Image by brentdanley via Flickr

Did you know that JetBlue has over 507,000 followers on Twitter? (as of 13 May, 2009). Yes, that’s more than half a million “fans” of the brand who choose to be exposed to the airline’s 140 character-long short messages. And this is almost 20 times greater than the second most followed airline, Southwest, which has just over 27,000 followers. But why? What is it that JetBlue does that makes it such a loved brand on Twitter?

I did some basic analysis and here are some stats for those of you who like numbers. Of the last 62 messages JetBlue sent out,

42 were replies to others (68%)
33 contained external links (53%)
12 were free tips, like how to overcome jetlag (20%)
10 answered customer service  queries (16%)
9 had sales offers/promotions of some sort (14%)
6 were Re-tweets (including one from SimpliFlying!) (10%)

It’s NOT just about selling on Twitter
The numbers tell a story. Do you realize that the overwhelming majority of messages were interacting with individuals, as they were replies. And there were …

 

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Rohit Bhargava is the author of a recently released book called Personality Not Included and also the blogger of the very popular Influential Marketing Blog. Recently, when he was asked “what is one brand desperately in need of personality?”, his answer (unsurprisingly) was United Airlines. Here is what he had to say:
The one that stands out for me simply because I travel a lot and live in a major hub is United Airlines. The amount of money they waste on brand campaigns is just staggering. Who in America hasn’t heard of United Airlines? No one. So why spend all this money to tell them who you are? They have so much potential to reinvent the way that they train their employees and that they use social media to allow people to have a more direct relationship with them. Sometimes I dream about getting them as a client because there are so many solutions that could make such a big impact on their brand. It’s uncommon to have a brand with that much untapped potential.
I couldn’t agree …

 

How would you feel if an airline starts following you on Twitter, and not only that, starts interacting with you as well? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to vote for the name of the next big thing in the airline industry in your country? Or how about feeling truly special on International Women’s Day?

These are all things airlines are doing these days to engage the customer. Advertisements can only create a certain level of awareness. But it is the active interaction with the customer, and the ability to surprise him or her like Virgin, which leads to true brand awareness, and ultimately trust and loyalty. A great example was how Singapore Airlines engaged their customers prior to launching their first A380 flights to London.
Here are three instances of how airlines around the world are delighting (or surprising) the customer by getting up, close and personal with them.

Popular blogger Jonathan Fields was recently “followed” by JetBlue on Twitter. He was initially surprised but soon was conversing with a real person from …