Over on Twitter, I was alerted to a letter published in Business Traveller Magazine where a customer had sent in a legitimate complaint letter to United Airlines, sharing his experience of poor service in Business Class and suggested that more investments be made into customer service training.

It was great that United Airlines actually responded to the letter in the magazine itself. And that’s where the positives ended. Of the five key points raised by the customer, only one was directly addressed. In fact, the response went on to totally digress from the topic and talked more about the airline’s new premium cabins, and not customer service. That got me thinking, it’s probably not just the cabin crew at United who needs lessons in customer service, but even folks from Corp. Comms.

This is very ironic, because just a couple of weeks ago, at the Loyalty 2010 event, while having lunch with Robert Sahadevan, United’s VP of Loyalty, I was very impressed by the focus they have on their frequent fliers and premium passengers. Hence, this response was disappointing, to say the least.

I thought I’d do my bit here for United (and help other airlines too, …

Now that you’ve had a chance to digest the imperatives of a social media policy from my article last week entitled “Five Imperatives For Your Airline’s Social Media Policy“, we decided to write a follow up post with additional considerations for inclusion. Again, these are must-have elements that make your social media policy very user-friendly. Objectives – Talk about the objective of using social media, so employees have a background as to why the company is participating.Disclosures — Educate employees about the FTC guidelines (pdf) about endorsements and testimonials, which is explained well in this article.  Basically, they are required to disclose the company’s connection with the product or service. Use common sense — You can explain that further in your company’s language, but it’s a good one to include. Give and take – Much of social media is about give and take, meaning that you “give” value, and “take” help or value back.  Don’t forget to work both sides of the equation. Personal versus work time — Define what is acceptable to do during work hours.  Updating …

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’ve got a sizeable social media presence for your airline over the past year. And now, the employees are starting to participate too. But there’s a constant tug of war, between Legal, Corp. Comms and Marketing – on how employees should and shouldn’t participate in social media. The solution? An airline-wide social media policy. What is a social media policy, you ask?  Basically, it addresses the concerns that many airlines have when getting started in social media… What if an employee says something they shouldn’t?  How do we respond to passenger complaints and compliments?  How can we possibly control what our employees are doing online?  If you’ve been up and running on social media for a few months, it’s time you formalize your thoughts in this area, and ensure everyone at the airline is on the same page.  Here are five key imperatives for your social media policy:   1. Explain the Scope in User-Friendly Terms When you say “social media policy” to many of your employees, they may think “that doesn’t apply to me because I’m not in Marketing.”  So, it’s important for your policy to explain what types of activities it covers, possibly including their personal Facebook …

A special day in aviation
Two important events took place in aviation today – both of which conjored mixed feelings in me.
1. The British High Court declared illegal the potential X-mas strike by British Airways‘ Unite union. The good news is that this promises hassle-free travel for almost a million BA travelers over the holiday period. The downside is that the union is keen on re-grouping to go on strike early next year.

2. It was the last day at work for Paula Berg, the force behind the successful new media brand strategy of Southwest Airlines for the past decade. She’s leaving to move back with the true love of her life – the mountains. So again, a bitter-sweet news. (Watch Paula’s video interview on SWA’s media strategy here)
What’s the link between Southwest Airlines and British Airways?
“So, what’s the connection”, you may wonder?

Paula had emailed me about her move last week and in her note included 68 reasons why she loved working at Southwest over the last ten year. Can you imagine an employee putting in so much affection and effort while she’s leaving? This only …

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 …

In the past few weeks, I’ve interacted with senior executives leading Marketing/Digital Marketing at a number of legacy airlines. Most of these have hardly made baby steps into social media branding. The biggest hurdle they seem to face is not achieving success in their new initiatives, but proving themselves internally.

And that’s only natural, since most monolithic organizations have more naysayers than doers. And the doers seldom have more clout than the naysayers. So, how to overcome this challenge?

Look within – start from the inside
My suggestion to these executives was to look at the upcoming marketing plans/campaigns. Something that’s already been budgeted for, and would be rolled out in the next three months. Then, work with the marketing team to “social media-fy” that plan. Basically, you’d want to add wings to the campaign through social media. And make sure there’s a way to measure the results (even if qualitative) so that you can measure the before-and-after effect of social media on the initiatives.

This allows you to achieve a few things:

You prove that social media adds value
There’s no need for substantial additional budget to run the SM activities
Working from …

I was sent this video at 1am last night, by Stuart Barwood. Even though I was in bed, I began watching it in bed on my iTouch. Not only did I watch it completely, I couldn’t sleep for quite some time afterwards. I couldn’t help but share it with my friends, clients and well-wishers who work with airlines. Because if there is something can help someone catalyze the social media branding efforts in his airline, it’s this video.

At one point in the video, the screen flashes, “In the near future, we will not find products or services, they will find us“. A simple sentence that can have significant implications on how airlines do marketing. Add on to this the fact pointed out by Morris Sim, CEO of Circos Brand Karma, at the recent WebInTravel event in Singapore, that statistics from Alexa that showed that about 1 in 20 visitors to travel websites in APAC were at Facebook right before. Social networks like Facebook could be so helpful to our business if we know how to make use of them. The time has come to act. Enjoy the video….

I often get asked by senior airline executives and readers of this blog, “How can we deal with real-world PR crises using social media?” Well, the recent war of words Facebook and Twitter posts between RyanAir and SAS Scandinavian Airlines offers a number of lessons in the matter.

For the unaware, here’s a a gist of what happened. Just a few weeks ago, Ryanair said it would offer SAS executives and board members “free tickets on any of Ryanair’s 100 Nordic routes”, then surprisingly rescinded the offer. Nevertheless, SAS’ Director of Communication and EVP, Claus Sonberg, made his first flight with Ryanair from Oslo to London, which could be followed via both Facebook and Twitter.

What was meant to be just an update about the flight experience turned out to be an online “shouting match” with Claus pointing out how RyanAir was more expensive and a “Fletcher Reede” constantly brought out RyanAir’s perspectives. So now, what are some lessons airlines can take away from this?

1. Integrate new media and old media
Something I feel SAS did quite well in this matter was to make …

Twitter has a huge aviation community – from airlines and airports, to cabin crew and aviation enthusiasts. Whether you like to fly a plane or just watch planes fly, there are lots of aviation geeks on Twitter with whom you can converse about your passions or just listen.

Many of these (very interesting) Tweeps are tapping into Twitter’s real-time network to offer up travel tips, airline recommendations (or warnings), and an inside look at life in the cockpit (or cabin). Personally, I have made some amazingly talented new friends on Twitter, whom I wouldn’t have known otherwise, from Melbourne to Muscat.

This list has 11 great aviation geeks to follow on Twitter, however please feel free to suggest others in the comments (or if you tweet on things that fly, leave your own Twitter info – for individuals only, not companies). These are in no particular order.

And you can certainly start with this list if you’re looking to follow my 11 suggested steps to lead the social media strategy for your airline!

Of course, if you aren’t following us on Twitter yet, we’re @simpliflying.


11 airline Journalists/Bloggers …