SimpliFlying has earned its reputation over the years by offering thought provoking insights into the world of airline branding. And nothing has been as instrumental affecting airline brands as social media.

As airlines become more active in this sphere, we attempt to answer a crucial question: Has social media truly benefited any airline? If so, how? To answer this question, we put together a series of case studies. In this set of six case studies, top executives from airlines such as Qantas, Volaris, airBaltic, Alaska Airlines, JetBlue, and of course, Southwest, talk about how their social media strategies are pushing their airlines into the next era.

Recently, Facebook announced that its user base now exceeds 500m. Twitter, on the other hand is still lagging in numbers, but the growth rate of users easily outstrips that of Facebook. As our case studies will show, both of these platforms offer their unique advantages in terms of customer engagement and information sharing. However, more importantly, each requires its own unique strategy.

The heady growth of social media has brought its own advantages and ills. While platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs and wikis offer unprecedented levels of engagement and information sharing with customers, there are perils …

The Simpliflying Hero for the month of June 2010 is….(drum roll)…Richard Ziskind. Richard is being recognized for his outstanding work at Omni Air International, with the introduction of social media to the organization.

He began his career with Omni Air in 2006, directly into his current position of Senior Director Marketing. Richard says,  “[my] position enables me to create new airline models and strategically implement innovative marketing and airline design for scheduled and non scheduled operations”. A large part of this implementation has been social media, which Richard says is an integral part of business change – keeping flexibility in communication and enhancing the marketing processes.

“Prior to social media, our broad stroke marketing campaigns did not offer the opportunity for us to communicate with our customers”, said Ziskind in his interview with Simpliflying. He says that Omni Air International has benefited greatly from their introduction of social media, lead by his enthusiasm and support.
Claim to Faim – introducing social media at an atypical airline
Richard and Omni Air use social media strategically, given that it doesn’t follow the business model of a …

Any branding initiative that doesn’t bring in a return-on-effort is not worth doing. Because then it becomes a hindrance. “Oh, I need to upload the photos onto the Facebook album” shouldn’t end up in deferment of important business-driving efforts. But then again, if uploading photos on Facebook is linked to the business objectives itself, then it’s a different conversation altogether.

At the Online Marketing for Travel Summit in Miami, I am shared my ideas on how travel firms (not just airlines) can drive conversion in online and social marketing. These are the slides from that presentation, with three specific ideas.

Converting Youtube lookers to bookers, using the Annotation tool in YouTube videos
Driving conversion by adding third party reviews in the booking engine
Using Flip.to for driving loyalty by getting people to share their travel plans

Enjoy the presentation! I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts on this, and how you drive conversion in your organization. Let’s discuss in the comments section, and on Twitter (@simpliflying)…

Remember the video I did about the future of flight if airlines adopted the technologies available today to enhance the flight experience? Inspired from that, I wrote an article on FlightGlobal’s ShowDaily at the Hamburg Interiors Show last week, which zoomed in on scenarios assuming airlines would adopt the latest free social media technologies today. And the result was quite enjoyable (from the reviews I’ve heard).

Hence, I’d like to share with you the full article here. You can click on the image to read in a larger font size, or view the text-only version here.

On this hypothetical flight,

After booking the flight, my Facebook and Twitter friends planned my trip, thanks to a tool called Flip.to
I pre-ordered food on Twitter
Pre-selected “family zone” on the flight, where people of similar interests would be sitting
I managed to get the wifi free, by filling up a survey on the landing page, when I turned on my browser
“Rented” a power point to plug in my Mac.
Was offered an iPad, but couldn’t rent it, as they were all booked in advance

So, what do …

This is a guest post by Miyuru, who is a teen aviation entrepreneur and analyst. He specializes in airline marketing, ancillary revenue and network development. He is also the blogger behind Airline Industry Review which he runs solely using his mobile phone. You can download his free eBook, The Ancillary Art, here .

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Both you and I know of airlines that have achieved success through social media. We also know of some who have failed to impress. I personally know some airlines who are not entering social media because of the fear it will be a waste of time and money.

How to achieve success through social media? What is the secret?
The success is in understanding social media. Why do people use social media services such as Twitter, Facebook and
MySpace ? The simple answer is, to connect. They want to meet new friends, to find out who likes them, to see how
can they become more popular, to see what is happening in the world. And they have millions of people on these social networks to select from.

So why should they pay attention to you if all you do …

Note: This article and slideshow, created by me, was first published on Mashable.com.

Hundreds of thousands of travelers scrambled to find alternative modes of transportation, last minute hotel bookings and even home-stays when the Icelandic volcano disrupted air travel around Europe over the last seven days. The official figure for airlines’ losses stands at $1.7 billion in just six days, with U.K.-based airlines British Airways and Virgin Atlantic likely to suffer the most.

Though it sounds like all doom and gloom, the silver lining of this crisis is that a lot of travelers looked to social media for help, and airlines and other authorities actually rose to the challenge. Here are some examples of winning information and customer service strategies that were implemented via social media.
Deep dive into social media for airlines
As I highlighted in-depth in my previous article, EuroControl was very impressive as they rushed to update passengers about the latest information about flights through a variety of online and offline mediums.

In just seven days, there were over 55,000 mentions of #ashtag, and the usage was so …

Three continents, three encounters, same story
Story 1, Los Angeles, early March 2010: Early last month, after a 22 hour flight from Singapore to Los Angeles, I was picked up by someone who works at Boeing, has a PhD in Aeronautical Engineering from Stanford, and an MBA from UC Irvine. In the six hours I had in LA, he introduced me to another very talented friend of his, who drove us to a vantage point from where we could see all of the LAX runways. We ended up spotting planes for over an hour.

Then we drove to the famous “In & Out” to spot more planes, before heading to a restaurant under the flight path of landing planes, for dinner. For a plane freak like me, this was like putting a kid in a candy store – all day long!

Story 2, Santiago de Chile, late March 2010: I had spent my first day in Santiago mostly sleeping in the hotel, as opposed to checking out the city. In the evening, I met with an airline industry veteran, who not only met me for …

Last week, I had the opportunity to present in front of a hall full of aviation executives from all across Latin America. This was at the IATA Wings of Change conference at FIDAE, in Santiago de Chile. The presentation was once again very well received and I was asked some intelligent questions.

As always, I’m happy to share the slides here on SimpliFlying for my readers. And I’d love to have your feedback. You can view my previous conference presentations and keynotes here.

Today, a number of airline accounts were hacked. First, NYC Aviation pointed out that United Airlines was sending out malicious tweets. Later, I received a Direct Message from Brussels Airlines, with exactly the same message, with the URL taking users to a sexual enhancement website.

Staying true to the real-time nature of social media, within minutes, the news of hacking was doing rounds all over the internet. Of course, it’s only to be expected, when United Airlines sends an abnormal Tweet to it’s 56,000 followers. Though United later removed the specific Tweet, the damage was done.

Reversing the brand damage to the airlines, in 3 steps
This is a situation that any airline jumping on the social media bandwagon can face. So, what’s the best way to deal with it? Here are three simple steps.

Be quick. Delete the malicious tweets from your updates (obvious!), but do it quickly. United Airlines took 1 hr 6 mins before their public tweet was …

If you’re already up and running on Twitter, Facebook or other social media tools, a great way to augment your social media efforts is by tapping on one of the hottest trends around, location based services (“LBS”). Location based social networking is something VERY well suited for airlines. Just like “Tweets” was the buzzword of 2009, by the end of 2010, I expect “Mayor” to be the buzzword. And, these services are made to work well in the travel industry.
Popular Location Based Services
If you’re unfamiliar with LBS, here are a few that are popular, including a couple of travel specific ones:

Foursquare - Foursquare is a location based game/application, where users “check-in” at places around the city.  They get points for check-ins, adding new locations, and extra points for multiple check-ins in one day.  Check-ins can be automatically shared on Twitter and Facebook.  They can also become “Mayor” of a location if they have been there the most out of all Foursquare users.  Friends have access to see where you are, and where you’ve been, which can facilitate social gatherings that might have not otherwise happened.

Some companies are starting to use this application to …