"[Working with SimpliFlying] has expanded our minds, opened our eyes and showed us what to do in concrete, practical, and tangible terms. We see the benefits not only to ourselves but to our members as well." - 
"SimpliFlying has a great balance - providing strategic insights and directions while maintaining a down-to-earth attitude in guiding LAN in strategy implementation. Justifying our investment to senior management was not difficult." - 
"The SimpliFlying MasterClass was a combination of trends and insights from the industry, as well as tailor-made topics designed to help Lufthansa progress to the next level of customer engagement. By having every management level participate, Lufthansa achieved great results in regards to 'social status' and loyalty, which was one of the key topics." - 
"At Estonian Air, we always look for partners who can bring innovation and good ideas, with the ability to execute. With Simpliflying, we get exactly that." - 
Text-based problems
As we’ve seen in our travel inspiration Top 10, one of the most commonly used methods to get users’ attention and to inspire them to travel has been the use of images, sometimes sourced from user-submitted material. Unfortunately, this solution is only effective on social networks that allow these images to be displayed prominently and shared. On text-based networks like Twitter, this presents a challenge.
Interestingly, one airline seems to have found the solution. Qatar Airways recently launched a Twitter-based initiative in which users created destination-related tweets and competed to win prizes.
Tweet a Meet
The campaign was a Twitter race wherein users tweeted about a Qatar Airways destination where they wanted to meet up with a friend. Each tweet needed to mention the Twitter handle of the friend they were partnering with, a hashtag with the name of the Qatar airways destination (eg. #Paris), the competition hash tag (#tweetameet) and, most importantly, relevant information about the city.
Some examples are presented below:
In order to take part in the competition, users had to register on a dedicated microsite, list a Twitter follower they wanted to meet and a Qatar Airways destination. Each tweet awarded the user a “Twitter-Mile” and the top-scoring teams would win return tickets to the destination they tweeted about.
The outcome
The competition has now ended and, even though the winners and number of participants have not yet been made public, the success of the campaign is evident. The airline managed to achieve two things: on the one hand it engaged users and prompted them to learn more about a destination, and on the other it turned these users into content creators who flooded Twitter with information about Qatar Airways’ destinations.
Moreover, the smart inclusion of a tag with the name of a destination in each tweet ensured that these tweets would appear in all Twitter searches of the town’s name. We also found that users often mentioned local businesses in their tweets prompting retweets from the more social-savvy ones, thereby amplifying the message.
We’re rather impressed by how, through this campaign, Qatar Airways has managed to cleverly engage travelers both at the SimpliDream (or inspiration) phase of travel as well as at the SimpliPlan phase. Not only would people be motivated to travel by learning about the various different destinations that Qatar flies to, they would also be able to decide which destination to travel to based on the reviews and information available at their fingertips on Twitter.
SimpliBrilliant!
Marco Serusi
Latest posts by Marco Serusi (see all)
- Airlines on Pinterest: in-depth look reveals a bit of a graveyard - March 18, 2013
- [eBook] Crisis Management for Airports and Airlines, in the age of the Connected Traveler - February 25, 2013
- Top 10 Valentine’s Day 2013 Initiatives by Airlines - February 20, 2013
