I had the opportunity to deliver the opening keynote at this year’s Navitaire Customer Summit, which is an annual gathering of the world’s leading budget airlines commercial and IT executives. And I spoke about how airlines and airports can drive results and ROI from social media – sharing tons of examples of airlines from around the world actually doing that. I also delivered a MasterClass at the Summit.

And as with all my presentations, I’m posting the presentation here for your viewing pleasure. Feedback welcome, and if you’d like to engage us to help you with your social media strategy or speak at your event – just drop us a note.
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If you still need proof of whether social media matters or not, you only have to look at the turnout for this year’s votes for the 2nd SimpliFlying Awards for Social Media Excellence. By the time voting closed after 2 weeks of stiff competition, more than 30,000 votes had been submitted from over 4500 cities. And this was after having shortlisted the Top Nominees from close to 60 nominations. The finalists for each category have been announced and they’ll face off in Amsterdam on October 10.

The innovations begin

When airlines initially began their adventure on the socialscape, it was all about about feeling their way about on the social platforms of their choice. The primary focus at the outset was first, discovering how to drive traffic and building a fan-base, followed by the more important aim of utilizing the platform for customer engagement and provide them a real-time medium of information-dissemination and customer service. Slowly, however, they realized that social platforms could also aid them in driving revenue. Flash sales, deals and contests became popular to attract more customers. However, the real innovations were still some time away.

A changing landscape

That time, it seems, has …

Yesterday, we posted a case-pack on the Best Airlines in Social Media. Today, completing our roundup of the top nominees in the airlines/airports category of this year’s SimpliFlying Awards for Social Media Excellence, we’re bringing you the Top 5 Airports in Social Media as nominated for the awards.
We’ve already recounted how the response to these awards has been huge and humbling at the same time: over 30,000 votes from 4500+ cities is a good enough reason to make our hearts swell with pride.
But today is special: it’s the last day of voting so if you haven’t yet voted for your favourite airline or airport, now’s the time to make amends. Voting closes at 5 pm PDT today.
You can also go through our other case-packs on the Best Airlines Driving Revenue and the Best Airlines Driving Customer Engagement and Crisis Management.
Meanwhile, you can check out the latest standings and vote for this particular category below:

Best Airport in Social Media
Before we jump into the case-pack, here are a few takeaways from these categories:

Airports are keen to ensure that passengers who travel through them …

I had the pleasure of presenting at the APEX 2011 Summit in Seattle this week. I was opening the social media Education Track with a presentation that aimed to set the tone for the rest of the day – and worthy speakers to follow. Hence, I focused on the road ahead for social media at airlines.

There were four key themes I highlighted on how social media will impact airlines in the coming months:

The availability of in-flight wifi to 200 million people this year would change customer engagement models
Loyalty programs would evolve to include social loyalty, where virtual actions lead to virtual rewards, like badges, rather than just free flights
Revenue and distribution would adapt to the social graph to skip the GDS, like the Malaysia Airlines Facebook booking app, or Alaska Airline’s FlyingSocial
Customer service will evolve where people expect to do all actions through social media, that they now do over the phone with an airline. Hence our partnership with InterGlobe Technologies to launch a social media call center

Check out these trends and more, in the presentation embedded below (Flash required)….

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 …

One of the bigger marketing challenges airlines face is to fill up the seats as quickly as possible, when launching a new destination. Typically, it takes over six months to reach a level where a flight is profitable. And this is after receiving marketing help from tourism agencies and also from airports – press releases to billboards in the terminals.

But as as we have long suspected, the traditional press release is rather dead and buried. Granted, it’s not dead in the truest sense of the word; however, it is undeniable that social technologies have morphed press-releases beyond recognition. Gone are the boring, wordy releases that used to accompany every major announcement in the industry. Welcome to the new age of social engagement!

Social media for route launches
Airlines these days have begun smartly leveraging the power of social media while making new product and route announcements. Forget the one-page release announcing the nature and benefits of the new route. These days, there are dedicated campaigns being run by airlines (as well as airports) to draw attention to their new routes and planes.

Witness the wide-ranging strategies adopted …

We had the excellent opportunity to deliver a presentation on customer engagement at the Aviation Outlook Africa summit that took place at Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa July 11th through 13th. This proved to be one of the most eye-opening conferences for me personally, as it was  interesting to have a two-way conversation with African airlines about the social era of customer engagement in a country (South Africa) in which just 10 percent of the population has reliable Internet access (a number that is even lower in most other parts of the continent).

The shifts in travel, and how to drive engagement
My presentation, “Two Paradigm Shifts in Travel and Three Ways to Drive Customer Engagement,” looked into how social media is changing the travel industry and what airlines and airports can do to leverage social tools to build stronger customer relationships. Like in any relationship, customer loyalty is bred from two-way communication, and while social media has given individual customers a stronger voice than ever before, it also provides airlines with an effective way to engage and understand them.

In this presentation, we illustrate …

If an image speaks louder than words, a moving image absolutely screams! In the last few years, especially with the growth of social media and video-sharing sites such as YouTube, videos have grown as a medium of customer engagement.

Videos are perfect for attracting and emotionally involving customers as you’ll see from this case-pack we’ve prepared. Some of these are specially created ad/social media campaigns while a few are impromptu videos taken of happenings in the air. All of them have one thing in common: they’re hugely engaging.

While it is difficult to predict how or why a particular video gains popularity over others, there are certain commonalities in all the videos included in this case-pack. So, if you’re an airline looking to create a video that engages customers, you might want to keep the following pointers in mind:

Keep the video short. Attention spans, as well as time, are limited.
Be innovative and disruptive. Guerrilla marketing campaigns often get a lot of eyeballs. eg. the magician act by KLM to promote the Economy Comfort product.
Say something that passengers care about or relate to. eg. Air New Zealand offering transparent fares
Being funny or entertaining is always a plus since it provides repeat watch …

After all the clamour regarding social media and how it’s the next big thing, we’re finally beginning to see some sense emanating from all the noise. Until now, there was an overwhelming feeling that what brands (among them airlines) really wanted out of social media was vague: there was no real consensus on what social media could actually do. It was mostly an unexplored quagmire that might yield riches or the swamp monsters. However, after an initial couple of years of experimentation, it’s quite evident that there are indeed riches to be gained from this quagmire. The bad news? There’s a monster protecting that treasure!
The Turning Tide
Undoubtedly, social media offers many benefits versus traditional forms of engagement. Some of them do bear repetition: the near-instant form of communication; two-way interaction compared to broadcast messaging; the ability to spread messages very fast across networks; the potential to identify and target “brand advocates” to drive brand awareness in cults (see Cult Relationship Management). We’ve strived to point out that a presence on social is media is not sufficient to do wonders for the brand: given that almost every airline is now on social media (our Monthly Airlines on Twitter report …

Last week, had the honor of presenting at the ACI Europe Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. While the city had beautiful weather, I addressed the audience of mainly airport CEOs and Commercial Heads on how to engage customers when the weather goes bad – in times of crises. I used a number of examples, from the Icelandic ashcloud to American Airlines flight 24 crises handling.

Here’s the presentation I delivered in Lisbon, the key point being that airlines and airports must use the same tools as their customers to communicate effectively and efficiently today.
 

Social Media Crises Management for airlines and airport on Prezi

In summary, I think here’s a picture that tells us what the future of crises management in aviation is going to be like (thanks to Aurelie Valtat for …