I had the opportunity today to deliver a keynote on how airlines and travel brands are driving social media ROI at the Eyefortravel Travel Distribution Summit in London.

The theme was on driving ROI from social media efforts for travel companies – airlines, airports, hotels etc. And as with all my presentations, I’m posting the presentation here for your viewing pleasure. A video will be shared as soon I get it from the organizers, meanwhile, you can watch my previous presentations or enjoy the presentation below.

Feedback welcome, and if you’d like to engage us to help you with your social media strategy – just drop us a line.
DRIVING ROI FROM SOCIAL MEDIA FOR AIRLINES – THE PRESENTATION

Here’s what Live audience were saying…
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Following the spectacular launch by SpiceJet of their Q400, airlines around the world seem to be acquiring a taste for the benefits brought by a social-media based launch campaign. Today we to take a look at how Malaysia Airlines (MAS) is presenting its brand new A380 to the world.

The airline has launched a campaign called “The Big Flight” where it offers the chance to win a ticket for an joyride on the A380 and be amongst the first to experience the new aircraft.

In order to enter the competition users have to submit a video proving that they can do something special like the YouTube celebrities that took part in the MAS campaign launch. The airline will then shortlist the best videos and the 8 most voted ones will win tickets for themselves and three friends.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtTv2t3hw4U[/youtube]
This initiative is part of a wider social launch campaign that uses Google+, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to create sharable content and generate expectation for the launch of the new aircraft.
 

Expect more great initiatives this year!
While route launches via social …

Westjet in Canada seems to be just as well loved as Southwest Airlines is in the US. The airline recently announced plans to launch a regional airline to serve secondary and tertiary Canadian cities with non-stop service using new regional aircraft. Since then, there has been a flurry of smaller Canadian airports trying to woo the airline and start service to their cities.

Bringing Westjet to Penticton
One of the most innovative of those efforts has come from Penticton Airport in British Columbia, which has a bunch of kids at the airport dancing to “Send me on my Way” from Rusted Root to woo West Jet into considering adding Penticton to their expanding regional network.

In addition to the Youtube video, they’ve creatively  added a Facebook page entitled, ‘Bring WestJet to Penticton‘  and followed up with a Twitter hashtag too, #westjetpenticton, to demonstrate all the local support there is for the service. And the city Mayor is involved in the efforts too!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSpLNflxhkg[/youtube]

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Certainly something to make WestJet route planners to sit up and take …

What’s the key to engaging customers in this time and age? For Martijn van der Zee, senior vice president of e-commerce at Air France KLM, the answer is simple: Get with the times, embrace failure and always listen to what your customers tell you.

We recently recorded a podcast with Martijn in which he shares some exclusive tidbits about KLM’s secrets to social media success: you can buy it at a special price of $19 here.

Late last year, a group of executives gathered for a social media presentation at a conference held in the Netherlands. Among the attendees was Martijn van der Zee, senior vice president of e-commerce at Air France KLM, who had with him a slide from a new initiative they were experimenting with. Little did he know how popular it would be at the conference – and on the Internet. Shortly after his presentation, the slide found its way online and became a viral hit, attracting millions of viewers worldwide.

The name of the initiative? Meet and Seat, a service that lets you use either Facebook or LinkedIn to view the profiles of other passengers on the same flight and choose your seat partner. The service …

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Shaun Smith, who has been a key catalyst in expanding management focus from the tactical issues of customer service to the much wider and strategic issue of customer experience. Shaun is also the author of “BOLD”. Find out more about him here.
What’s the biggest obstacle to implementing customer experience successfully?

‘Lack of strategy’ according to Forrester’s annual State of Customer Experience report 2011.

We agree, but strategy in itself – even if it is bold, differentiated and customer-centric – won’t guarantee success. Where we see most companies fail is in the execution.

In our work with brands around the world we see that there is a lack of coherent thinking about how brand positioning, marketing, customer experience and employee experience fit together, and, dovetail they must if you are to be successful. Many of you will be thinking about how to execute your customer experience strategy in 2012 so let’s see what we can learn from a topical example…
A tale of two airlines…
There are two major Asian airlines that have recently posted their 4th quarter results for 2011. They share some common features; both employ very attractive flight attendants dressed in smart red …

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 …

I delivered a speech today at the Airline Retail Conference 2012 in Singapore, around the topic of driving revenues and engaging customers using the latest in-flight entertainment and connectivity technologies. The focus was around leveraging three key shifts:

Gadgets in-flight – personal and those supplied by the airlines
The connected traveler – and how to drive engagement and revenue
Learning from other retail models – in this case Kuala Lumpur International Airport and Tesco in Korea

Sharing here my Prezi presentation. The recorded video will be available soon too, so please do check back!

The future of in-flight enternainment and technology on Prezi

(Photo Credit: Sergio Mello, Satisfly)

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 …

Update: The campaign has been featured on Facebook Studio and also shortlisted for the Shorty Awards!
Airlines these days are chasing the elusive return on social media. And while the number of “likes” or “followers” and video views are all the rage, it’s ultimately the return on investment (ROI) that matters the most. About a year ago, AAdvantage ran possibly the most viral Facebook campaign for an airline – fans grew almost 100X in just 54 hours. But ROI numbers were not necessarily as impressive.
Now, COPA Airlines from Panama has numbers to prove a 50X ROI from their recent Facebook app – an effort for which Diego Quesada Grimaldo, their eCommerce Director, was nominated for the SimpliFlying Heroes Award last month!

Pasaporte America to promote destinations
To promote its network in the Americas, COPA recently held a Passport America sweepstakes, asking the public to tell the airline which 10 destinations they’d like to visit first if they were the winner. Participants could explore each of COPA Airlines’ 59 destinations on the map, and then select their favourite 10. One person won a trip for two to all of COPA’s 59 destinations.

The Facebook-centric campaign (app no …

Over the last year, SimpliFlying went pretty big with infographics. Big both in terms of the issues we tackled and the buzz we generated. We scored especially huge hits with our social future of loyalty and resources dedicated to social media infographics, apart from the regular Monthly Airlines on Twitter Report published in partnership with Eezeerdatalab.

And now, we’re kicking off the New Year with a bang as we present a new infographic, in partnership with our friends at Eyefortravel, on a burning issue that airlines and travel marketers in general will be looking to tackle over the next twelve months. Two questions in particular are addressed in this infographic:

In what direction does the industry see social media evolving?
What business goals travelers are driving and if they’re calculating ROI

While we do seem to have a consensus on the answer to the first question – the future is certainly mobile – uncertainty remains about how to measure ROI on social media. (We’ve tackled this briefly in a previous infographic as well). The uncertainty looms large primarily because while there are divergent ways in which people do measure ROI, there is also a section that questions the need to …