Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Arun Rajagopal, a social media manager who is based in Dubai and loves all things aviation. You can follow his #avgeek adventures on Twitter at @arun4 or on his blog.

If you are a travel brand into social media, identifying, connecting and building a relationship with your online brand loyalists and advocates must be an important element of your social media strategy.

Embracing your influencer customers and having a special relationship with them has manifold benefits. They move up from the brand loyalty to brand advocacy scale, give you repeat business, stick with you during good times and bad times, provide you valuable feedback on your products and services but also give you more word of mouth PR via earned media and help you in acquiring more customers through their social reach. It is also more cost effective to retain them than acquire new prospects. Their actions are also more measurable and accountable to the bottom line, from an ROI point of view.

However, many brands focus more on customer service, push marketing and community management on social media, and rarely give online influencer marketing and outreach the importance it deserves.

My experience with India’s …

Editor’s Note: Here’s another guest post by Peter Claridge of Unmetric, an exclusive aviation partner of SimpliFlying. Unmetric is a social media benchmarking company that helps brands analyse how well they’re doing on social media by including in-depth insights into numerous metrics as well as information on what kind of content “works” and how competitors are faring. Among Unmetric’s list of illustrious clients are Citibank, Nestlé and AirTel.

In many respects, Facebook takes the limelight when it comes to looking at how an airline is engaging with the community. However, over the past couple of years Twitter has inadvertently become the public helpdesk for brands around the world. Many airlines have been quick to establish a presence here to ensure that where ever there are questions and praise (and to some extent, complaints) a representative is there is respond in 140 characters.

US airlines, like many other US brands, have been quick to build their Twitter teams and are blazing a trail for many other global airlines to follow. SimpliFlying and Unmetric decided to dig a little deeper using the Unmetric platform to see if there is a clear leader or whether all airlines are doing a similar job. We collected and analyzed the …

Even though it seems like yesterday, our popular top 10 initiative has reached its first birthday and we’ve decided to celebrate it with a king-size slide deck featuring the best case studies from our past top 10s.

This top 50 has been designed not only to celebrate the first birthday of the SimpliFlying’s Top 10s but also to provide our readers with a unique downloadable resource that features what we think are the very best marketing initiatives put forward by airlines and airports over the past few years.
An idea-generating tool
However we do not wish this top 50 to be a sort of “museum” of past initiatives but rather a tool for airline professionals to generate new ideas. We hope that by viewing such a wide variety of outstanding initiatives in a single slide deck, other marketers will be inspired to create other new and innovative campaigns that will form the basis of future SimpliFlying Top 10s.

You will notice that each case study has a category indicator before its title. These indicators refer to the original top 10 that featured that particular case study, and have been included  to facilitate further research into the subject.
A year of top 10s
The list below provides links …

Note: Earlier this month, we announced a revamp of the SimpliFlying Heroes initiative, giving our readers a greater say in whom we choose by adopting a transparent voting system. In a keenly contested round that saw about 3000 votes pour in over the course of a week, Pooja Dua of SpiceJet emerged the winner, having received almost half of the total votes submitted! Read more about SpiceJet’s excellent social media initiative led by Pooja below.

Even though India is the world’s fastest-growing domestic market in aviation, it is not yet known for airlines that are superstars in engaging or offering customer service via social media. Or at least, until now. Last year, SpiceJet, a leading domestic low-cost carrier in India, launched the Bombardier Q400 in a market that’s traditionally sceptical and scared of flying turboprops (popularly classified as the “planes with fans outside”).  What’s more, they chose the untested waters of social media for propelling their route-launch and tasted tremendous success, achieving over 88% load-factor in the first two weeks itself. Moreover, they also earned countless new fans, followers and increasing engagement manifold on their social media channels. So how did they achieve this? We reached out to …

When thinking of marketing and advertising one could hardly imagine two more different customer experiences than the ones provided by the so called “wow” campaigns we’ve seen over holidays season, and the leaflets that are often handed out to passengers while walking through the terminal, or on the streets.
“Wow” campaigns and leaflets hand-outs do not mix. Right?
After all “wow” campaigns are something that everyone talks about for a long time, while a leaflet is just something we normally throw away without even looking at it. Right? And of course nobody would ever think that the two concepts might even remotely be compatible.

Now watch the following video ….
Handing out leaflets in Barcelona
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/30838127[/vimeo]
Yes, right, obviously in the video we see a campaign were an airline representative is handing out leaflets, so just a common leaflet-hand-out campaign, like the one we mentioned before…  but wait a minute this guy isn’t being ignored, everyone is staring at him, they stop by, have a chat, read their leaflets carefully…

Of course, one might be mistaken to think that this is indeed one of those “wow” campaigns, after all the person handing out the leaflets is indeed moving around on a cloud, and, it …

On the morning of December 1st 2011, the world woke up feeling a little empty and sad: Rico, the Air New Zealand mascot, had been “killed”. Eleven days after the unthinkable happened, and thanks to the help of Rico’s Facebook followers the “killer”, Richard Simmons, confessed his “crime”.

Even though he is no more, for marketers and air transport professionals alike Rico will live forever as part of our memories, presentations and as a source of inspiration for future strategies. What follows is a resume of his brief but well-lived life that, hopefully, will help us remember his best moments and better understand the marketing strategy for which he was created, due to which he thrived, lived and, sadly, was done away with.

Rico’s character was originally launched in October 2010 to promote Air New Zealand’s premium economy space seats. Even though what sort of animal he was and where he came from always remained a bit of a mystery, his fluffy persona was apparently designed as an effort to differentiate the advertising campaign by not using a human being. As Rob Fyfe CEO of Air New Zealand explained in his …

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 …

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 …

From a startup to an award-winning Indian airline flying international
It’s not often you see the CEO of a low cost airline in a tuxedo. But that’s exactly what Aditya Ghosh was dressed in, when I last met him at the CAPA Aviation Awards for Excellence in Singapore last month – where Indigo Airlines won the Best LCC award. This was the second time we had met, after meeting at another award ceremony in London earlier in the year, where he carried a trophy home too.

Indigo has been on a streak. After starting operations just five years ago domestically and recording one of the best on-time performances in India, we predicted three years ago that the airline would end up being one of the best in the country (watch interview with CCO), and indeed they’ve gone on to become the second largest in India. They have recently started flying international and recently placed the largest aircraft order in history.

With such  growth comes the need to raise awareness internationally, which is what their latest advertisement seeks to do.

A Runway Musical – an original, or is it?
Touted as …

When you walk down the scorching tarmac at the Dubai Air Show, you’ll spot an unmissable “igloo” amongst the chalets and aircraft displays. That “igloo” houses the brand new Bombardier CSeries cabin mockup and the flight deck, which was unveiled at Dubai Air Show for the first time.

Amidst talk of re-engining or stretching of narrow-body jets by Airbus, Boeing and Embraer, the CSeries remains the only brand-new aircraft. And that means it’s not an incremental, but a disruptive change over existing technologies. Having toured the cabin mockup once, over a year ago, I had the opportunity to be back in the final mockup (before the real plane is built) at the Dubai Air Show 2011.

I’m sharing here a video in the cockpit, with Chet Fuller, the SVP of Sales, Marketing and Asset Management at Bombardier, and another with Sam Cherry, Director of Product Strategy (who led the original tour a year ago) sharing what’s new. Great fun for an #avgeek like me and certainly for the passenger when this beauty takes to the air. Enjoy!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyVa8amVPig[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb3ncSGZB4k[/youtube]
Disclosure: Bombardier Commercial Aircraft is a SimpliFlying client and among …