What a year it has been for the airline industry when it comes to marketing. With healthier profits this year, we’ve seen many airlines push the envelop when it comes to marketing and social media innovation. So to sum up the year, we’re sharing the top 11 marketing innovations by airlines in 2011.

While going through these, you’ll also realize that most of those that made the list aren’t one-off campaigns, but mature strategies made up of tactics that drive very specific business goals. So gone are the days of fluffy, one-off social-media campaigns with questionable ROI. Hope these inspire you for 2012!

Estonian Air social loyalty program: AirScore, the airline’s groundbreaking, yet simple, loyalty program rewards travelers for online advocacy. You earn virtual points on Facebook for sharing a trip report or booking through the airline’s Facebook app. And these can be redeemed for simple privileges like fast-security lane access. In 10 days, the program generated over a million impressions on Facebook, more than the number of passengers carried by the airline in a year! It’s now won three global awards in three months. Read more… (airlinetrends.com)
SpiceJet Bombardier …

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 …

Crowdsourcing has always been a fascinating and (often) rewarding aspect of social media. Ever since airlines realised the power of the social web, they have dabbled in crowdsourcing in various ways.

However, now, in a uniquely new initiative, Lufthansa Cargo has launched a new contest inviting people to use their imagination and present their “Green Solutions” and ideas for “Add-On Services” to help reduce the cargo company’s environmental impact and improve their services.

The initiative is unique because this is the first time a cargo carrier is entering the fray of social media to crowdsource ideas. Second, it has to be admitted that, if implemented, some of these solutions could not just pave the path for a greener planet but also for a huge change in the industry per se.

Great initiative, great ideas
The contest is open to anyone in the world and all entries are posted online in an open forum where people can review and comment. According to Lufthansa Cargo, proposals can cover any aspect within the Lufthansa Air Cargo Supply Chain (Sales, Handling, Transport,Customer Service) that fall within the categories of Green Solutions and/or Add-On Services. The exciting …

I had the opportunity to deliver a presentation and a MasterClass at the ACI Airport Exchange in Abu Dhabi, on the road ahead for social media for airports around the world.

While I focused on key business goals like driving customer service and non-aeronautical revenue, I shared case studies from this year’s SimpliFlying Award winner London Gatwick and nominee Changi, among others. During the half-day MasterClass, I shared in-depth case studies and gave the participants a feel of how using free tools like socialmention.com and Geochirp.com can make their job easy when trying to engage customers.

I share with you here my Prezi presentation from the conference. A video recording will be posted up soon as well. Would love your comments on this.
 

ACI on Prezi

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 …

If twenty years ago one had asked an airline marketing executive about the dangers that a bad experience, passed on through word of mouth, could represent for the company’s image and brand he/she would have probably laughed. And with some degree of reason too!

After all, those were the good old days when, if one passenger had a bad experience he would tell his friends and family who may or may not have told a slightly distorted version of the story to their friends and family members… and the story would pretty much have ended there.

However, in the age of Twitter, Facebook and instant 24/7 global communication, the story doesn’t quite end there anymore. Even one annoyed passenger out of a whole planeload has the power to share his experience not only with his friends and family but also with millions of complete strangers who may in turn share it with a million others.  And this time the story does NOT end there.

Moreover, according to recent research, 25% of social media users expect a response within an hour and 6% expect something within 10 mins!
Time to start thinking about social customer service!
Unfortunately, only a handful of airlines and airport seem …

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 …

Yes, you read that correctly. I did not write Web 2.0. Of course, that’s not because it’s not relevant – it’s terribly relevant – but because this newer term encompasses Web 2.0 and then some. So what exactly do I mean by Mobile 2.0 and why is it important? Cutting to the chase, here are some things we all know: first, ordinary feature phones are dying a fast death and smartphone shipments are rising as iOS and Android become increasingly popular with others, such as Windows Phone 7, hot in pursuit. Second, people are increasingly using their phones to do tasks they earlier used their laptops or desktops for: hotel search, ticket bookings, banking, emails, etc. Third, smartphones are creating an all new category of the always connected traveler – a web-savvy, social-networking geek who isn’t afraid to declare to his virtual networks what he’s thinking or doing.
The future is mobile
Given the rapidly changing interactional/behavioural habits of the traveler, it has become important for airlines to target them where they can be found. Close your eyes and think for a moment about what the word mobile phone means to you: I’m quite certain that most of the readers here …

As a number of you are aware, we held our annual SimpliFlying Awards in Amsterdam last week. During that period, I stayed at CitizenM – a hyper-chic hotel in Amsterdam that also happened to win the Best Hotel in Social Media Award.

Once I returned to Singapore, I received an email from the CitizenM manager, thanking me for their stay. What I often receive from a number of airlines I fly, and classify as spam, turned out to be a revelation in how follow-up emails should ideally be written. I’ve attached a screenshot of that email here (click here for full-size).

Writing good emails for airlines 101
Almost all the emails I receive from airlines (trust me, it’s more than 10 a week), I classify as spam. Some market the vacation to Bora Bora when I have a 100 miles to redeem in my account. Others send me fares specials from Boston, a city where I used to live two years ago!

Most of them are just impersonal, computer-generated, faceless pieces of communication that I bet most travelers ignore. Why else do you think the industry …