The past year has been an interesting and very successful one for Simpliflying with a number of new client acquisitions and tons of exciting free resources such as infographics and Top 10 case-packs posted regularly to the blog amongst other things. At the brink of the new year, we relive ten of the most popular articles on SimpliFlying in 2011:

10. Social seating: Have you read about the Malaysian Airline initiative that led the airline to create a much talked about Facebook booking engine that allowed people to sit with their friends on the airline’s flights?

9. Airports in social media: In the ninth place we have a Top 10 case-pack, an initiative helmed by our Senior Innovation Officer Shubhodeep Pal, on how airports have driven engagement trough social media.

8. Blockbuster social initiative: Next, in 8th place we find one, if not the, most successful social media campaigns of 2011, the AA Advantage “mystery miles” campaign that hit the headlines in February by achieving an 84 fold growth of its Facebook fans in 54 hours.

7. Airline Twitter initiatives: In the seventh place we find …

“You have such a cool job. I’m so jealous…”
“But honestly, do you even have a job?”
“Wow! That sounds interesting. But I still didn’t get what you do.” [Cue embarrassment at one end. Exasperation at the other.]
“When do you work? How do you work? It’s possible to work only on a computer? From anywhere?”
“Are you looking for a job? There’s an opening at…”
Believe it or not, none of these sentences is made up. Over a year of working with SimpliFlying, I’ve become accustomed to being bombarded with variants of such inanities more often than not. Happily, most of the times such queries are easily shrugged at or laughed off. But there comes a time when you want to reflect on the past year, on where you stand, where you’ve reached from where you started and of course, dispel any doubts that might linger in the minds of those (such as some over-inquisitive relatives) who’re eager to know more about you and your work. The brink of a new year is the perfect time for such soul-cleansing.

The Machinist
First of all, yes …

Our friends at Eezeer have analysed the Twitter habits of airlines as well as their fans/customers for the month of November and have produced the Monthly Twitter Report in continuation with their monthly coverage and analysis of the dynamic social media landscape for airlines.

At the close of the year, it’s worth pausing to consider how quickly the social landscape has evolved over the past year or so. Airlines have not only embraced Twitter but have also realised that there’s great value in using it to drive specific goals such as revenue, engagement and loyalty. Many innovative initiatives on Twitter have been captured in our Top 10 case-packs as well. It’s worth noting that as of November 2011 there were 198 airlines on Twitter with 90 actively tweeting. This, more than anything else, is a sign of changing times and even greater change to come.

A number of facts are immediately clear from this report:

Even though most airlines have jumped on to the Twitter bandwagon, the majority of the tweets are produced by a minority of airlines. 30 airlines provide more than 83% of tweets sent out by airlines.
Delta Air Lines is still the runaway champion, having been consistently been a …

Yes, I said it: branding!

The benefits of crowdsourcing, and its effectiveness for problem solving, are well-known. The power of the social web is being harnessed by airlines more than ever (in fact, a cargo-carrier has recently got into the game as well). Crowdsourcing initiatives are now being used not  just to engage customers but also to find ways to improve their product and services, as well as at the same time building their brands. Hence, “crowdbranding”.

With today’s Top 10 case-pack we would like to highlight some of the best examples of airline crowdsourcing. At the same time, we also invite our readers to have a look beyond the surface and into the deeper strategic goals that drive each of these strategies. In some cases it will be clear that the end game was indeed solving a problem or finding an innovative way of addressing existing issues, but in others it will also be clear that the stated goal of the crowdsourcing campaign wasn’t the only goal.

Most of the airline examples included in this Top 10 used crowdsourcing to solve problems related to visible parts of their product such as in-flight meals or routes, and did so in …

In our latest top 10 case-pack we talked about the importance of social-media-based customer-service and how both bad and good experiences can be amplified and spread at incredible speed on it. We also mentioned that according to recent research, 25% of social media users expect a response within an hour and 6% expect something within 10 minutes!

For today’s post we’re looking at customer-service from a different angle and submitting to you the thesis that airlines having in-flight WiFi could possibly harness the power of social customer-service in radically new ways. For example,  some customers might post something on your Facebook page while in the flight, and expect you to do something before the plane lands.

But what if they ask you to do something you never expected? (Something good, of course!) Read on to see what a delighted customer wrote:

“If someone in the Southwest Airlines corporate HQ can see this – I’m on flight 913 currently en route to Phoenix and I want yall to know that our flight attendant Holly is perhaps one of the most remarkably kind and helpful people my girlfriend and I have ever met. If you can meet us at the gate with something …

What a year this is turning out to be for Qantas! In June, the Chilean ashcloud crisis affected many of their flights for an extended period. For their stellar efforts in responding to the crisis, especially on social media, they were even one of the Top Nominees in the category for Customer Service (check out the case-study here) for this year’s SimpliFlying Awards for Social Media Excellence. Then almost out of the blue, disaster (at least for passengers and from a PR perspective) struck when, on October 29, following instructions from CEO Alan Joyce, Qantas announced that it was grounding all flights indefinitely, with employees not required to report to work.

Another crisis presents itself
Quite understandably, almost immediately, the interwebs exploded. While passengers vented their dismay and fury, it’s notable that even most employees were taken unawares that led to an initially wary and “slow” response from Qantas as customer inquiries flooded the official Twitter account. Tweets talking about and mentioning Qantas shot up. Very soon, “Qantas” and “Alan Joyce” were trending Worldwide, indicating tweets containing these keywords in excess of 1000 per minute. While the initial response from Qantas was decried as being too “mechanical and impersonal”, Virgin seized …

What a fabulous journey it has been! To say that the 2nd SimpliFlying Annual Awards for Excellence in Social Media were a success, would perhaps be an understatement. Right from sowing the seeds online to reaping the rewards offline in Amsterdam on October 10, this year’s SimpliFlying Awards journey has been exhilarating and extremely rewarding.

Behind the Scenes
In more than a year of being with SimpliFlying in various capacities, helping get the Awards machine up and running has been by far the grandest enterprise I’ve been involved with. The first and most immediate challenge that faced us was to ensure that we received a fairy representative roster of nominations. In this we succeeded most handsomely, getting almost 70 nominations over 4 categories.

Then came the greater challenge: actually getting votes for the top nominees. In this endeavour, we pursued three diverse methods: first, we constantly promoted #SMAwards on the SimpliFlying Twitter channel that has close to 8,000 followers. By means of numerous retweets and mentions on Twitter, we reached a wide audience. Second, we used our SlideShare channel to promote the top nominees in each category by producing 4 …

It gives me great pleasure to share with you that SimpliFlying has been awarded the Gold medal in the 2011 Magellan Awards in the Online Travel Services |Blog category! These annual awards are organized by Travel Weekly, the travel industry’s most influential national trade publication.

This is our third major award in our 2.5 years of existence – we were among the Top 2 aviation blogs on the FlightGlobal Webbies in 2010 and won the Global Brand Leadership Award in 2009.

The numbers speak for themselves
In August 2011, we hit a record-breaking 75,000 unique visitors mark. While it may not sound like a lot compared to mainstream sites like Mashable, given our niche focus on aviation marketing, we think it’s worthy of a mention. Our Youtube channel now has over 800,000 views, presentations on Slideshare have been viewed over 150,000 times and we’re breaching the 8000 mark for our Twitter followers. So SimpliFlying has been Simply Flying of late
Why winning the Gold in Magellan Awards is a BIG deal…
The …

After receiving over 30,000 votes in just two weeks from airline, airport and hotel fans all over the world, we announced the finalists for the 2nd Annual SimpliFlying Awards in Social Media Excellence, to be held at the EyeforTravel Online Marketing and Social Media Summit on Oct 10 in Amsterdam.

Now, we are announcing a panel of distinguished judges who will preside over the 10 minute presentations by each of the finalist hotel, airline and airport. These judges will take a decision on the winner after viewing the presentations Live in front of the full conference audience!
Raymond Kollau – Airlinetrends.com

Raymond Kollau is founder of an independent industry and consumer trends research agency airlinetrends.com. Airlinetrends.com monitors the global aviation industry for commercial innovations in response to changing consumer behavior. Having been part of leading consumer trend firm trendwatching.com since its inception, Raymond founded airlinetrends.com to focus on trends and innovations in the global airline industry.

Raymond holds a Master degree in Business from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands and also studied International Relations at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. His …