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 …

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by our partner, Philippe Scheimann from SOSTravelers.com on what to do in a situation where  you’re stranded while traveling during Thanksgiving. The article provides tips on what to do if you’re stuck and still want to carry on your travel plans.

Thanksgiving is happening this week in the US. Thanksgiving day is a historic tradition of celebrating with family, friends, food, and giving thanks for all the good we have in our lives.

Hence, this is one of the busiest period for traveling, especially this holiday is concentrated within a few days so that there is not much room for flexibility.

Let us review the various tips the SOStravelers team has gathered around the Web as well as our own tips.

Preparation – Before leaving
1. Book your tickets now / yesterday

Well, if you have not done so yet, you will have to be very creative to find some solutions online or have your travel agent work extra hours!

2. Look into alternate airports & Ditch connections

If your favorite airport does not provide you with some solutions, you may as well look around, even drive for several hours and get a seat in a flight from another …

Yes, we gave an award to Qantas for their work with handling the Chilean volcanic ash crises through social media last month, at SimpliFlying Awards for Social Media Excellence. And when you win an award, you should be expected to do more of  the same things better. But it looks like Qantas is attracting social media crises these days like bees to honey!

After causing lots of unhappiness amongst passengers due to the complete fleet being grounded, and then getting some more flak for lack of pro-active response through social media, a simple Twitter contest backfired completely today for the battered airline brand.

The contest was meant to highlight creative aspects of the luxury offered in the premium cabins at Qantas, but it only took an hour for the #QantasLuxury hashtag to trend as passengers and Australia in general vented their frustrations with tweets. Over 51 tweets were being received per minute on the hashtag, and soon mainstream press covered it too.

While we’ve compiled here a number of key tweets and messages in the crises as it unrolled, we’d like to ponder about some questions too:

What could …

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by our partner, Philippe Scheimann from SOSTravelers.com on what to do in a situation where Twitter is down and you’re stranded. The article provides Top 10 tips on what to do if you’re stuck and still want to carry on your travel plans.

In previous articles published in collaboration with SimpliFlying (see crisis management section) and at SOStravelers.com, we have shown how Twitter can be very useful if you get stuck in an airport or in some remote place because of an earthquake or various other reasons.

Thanks to Twitter, you may be able to connect to your airline company, become a follower, send and receive direct messages. It may actually be faster than waiting in line to talk with an airline rep who may not be updated with all the current information.

Twitter also allows you to get information from reliable sources as well as connect with other people who are willing to help (use #getmehome..).
At SOStravelers, we very much use Twitter and like to help stranded travelers who tweet for help (see our first story).

However, it happened and unfortunately it will happen again: you try to send a tweet, connect to …

Editor’s note: Did you know that KLM guarantees a reply to every tweet within 60 minutes? And @DeltaAssist will reply to all tweets within 10 mins and resolve your issue within 24 hours? How do they provide such customer service online? To answer these questions, we asked the super-exuberant Jenn Seeley from Radian6 to shed some light on the issues through a guest post.

Jenn is a Community Engagement Specialist at Radian6 in the worlds of travel & aviation. She loves take-offs, landings and in-flight snacks. You can tweet with her @jenn_seeley as she welcomes sharing and engaging.

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Many airlines have boarded the social media plane for managing customer service  – some are just taking off at greater speeds than others. What can you do to ensure your airline is soaring higher than ever and delivering the service your customers dream of? Let’s break it down in five easy steps!
Always begin with a plan!
So, you can see your customers from time to time talking about you online. You hear them loud and clear. However, projects without a strategy can be a waste of efforts, energy and resources. Sure, you are going to want to reach out and fix every issue you …

SimpliFlying is back with the  Monthly Twitter Report for airlines (in partnership with Eezeer) for August 2011 in continuation with our coverage and analysis of the dynamic social media landscape for airlines.
After close to 6 months of reporting monthly on how airlines are using Twitter, we can safely say that apart from Facebook, Twitter is the social media platform of choice for most airlines. The number of tweets sent and received has been rising in general for months in a row. Airlines have also become more forthcoming as well as responsive.
This month, while the usual suspects (Delta and JetBlue) are once again on the list of top engagers, Cebu Pacific absolutely storms into the list. Not only is it placed second on the list of airlines receiving the most number of public tweets, it also scores the highest in the Global Satisfaction Score with a score of 106.7. (For more details, see the infographic.)
A number of facts are immediately clear from this report:

As we’ve mentioned, Cebu Pacific is second on the list of airlines receiving the most number of public tweets with more than 11,000 to its name. However, Delta Air Lines is once …

Well, well, well! This year’s race for the 2nd SimpliFlying Awards for Excellence in Social Media is heating up like never before. Our awards are not just featured on the homepages of Malaysia Airlines and Air New Zealand but have gained huge traction on the web as well. Just about a week into voting, the total number of votes has already crossed 12,000!

Votes, as we mentioned in the previous slide-deck on the Best Airlines Driving Revenue through Social Media, have come from around 2500 cities across the world. We promised recently that we’d regularly post case-packs illustrating the fabulous campaigns that have led the final nominees to be shortlisted. And we’re back this time with another 5 great case-studies on how 5 of the best airlines in the world have used social media to drive Customer Service and Crisis Management.

This would be a good time to remind you that voting is still ongoing so you can vote for your favorite airline until 15th September. Do vote if you care about the airline you love! Meanwhile, you can check out the latest result for the current category below.

Best use of social …

Update: The article now includes two bonus points, specifically addressing Hurricane Irene! (thanks to Vinay Bhaskara for those)

On August 27, 2011, Hurricane Irene hit the US East Coast, all the way up to New York City! Just prior to that, on August 23rd, an earthquake measuring 5.8 on the Richter Scale hit the US east coast. It shook the nation’s Capital and was felt strongly in New York but luckily not many were hurt. It happened just hours after the strongest earthquake in Colorado in 40 years, and one in Colombia. Airports in NYC, DC, Virginia were shut down and power and cellphone lines cut. So while people couldn’t make calls or receive them, they could send text messages, tweet, post on Facebook and in other social networks and fuel all kinds of hot debates.

We reached out to our partner, Philippe Scheimann from SOSTravelers.com and asked him for a guest article on what to do in such a situation, when a crisis hits a region not well prepared to deal with it. Hence, here is the guest article by Philippe, which provides Top 10 tips on what to do if you’re stuck at an airport after …

Social technologies are gaining huge traction among airlines. There’s simply no denying it. A couple of months ago, we released an infographic that showed how airlines are dedicating resources to social media. Most major airlines, according to the infographic, already have social media teams in place – most are managing cross-departmental strategies. Some even have plans to expand their teams later this year. That infographic was deemed to be a truly important one as far as the topic of airlines in social media was concerned: it received over 100,000 views and was featured in a number of publications including twice on Mashable itself!
Make sense of the chaos
Now, to add to all the hullaballoo, it really doesn’t help that social technologies are not just adding newer features regularly, but new social technologies themselves are being launched a dime a dozen (any takers for Google+ in airlines?).

So if you’re an airline marketer and thinking really hard about which social technologies to adopt apart from the usual suspects, we have the perfect remedy for your troubles. In fact, even if you’ve figured out which social platforms to adopt, you might still be wondering how best to use them or …

Editor’s Note: A day before I spoke about putting the joy back into the airport experience at the Annual ACI Conference in Lisbon, Philippe Scheimann from SOSTravelers.com suggested that he wanted to write a guest article as a follow up to his earlier ‘How to empower stranded travelers‘. We decided that that the next article could be on how to help airports turn stranded travelers into happy consumers. Hence, here is the guest article by Philippe.

This is a very challenging question since, by definition, stranded travelers are in a difficult situation, often far away from home, in a difficult environment where uncertainty is high. Stranded travelers are usually left on their own, airport and airline officials have often no answer to provide because of the inherent uncertain nature of the event and are limited in what they can do to help travelers at a loss for helping the travelers.

The following items may not work for everyone, everywhere. However, they show various directions that will need to be customized and modified according to the specifications of the location, the needs of the travelers and various other parameters.

Let us assume several assumptions to start with:

We are talking about stranded …