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 …

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 …

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)….

At SimpliFlying, we love to track our numbers using Google Analytics. And when we realized that not only was our About Us page the most popular on the site, but people were spending the most time on it too, we thought we should do something really different with it.

Given the success of our last couple of infographics, which garnered over 100,000 views, we wondered – why not create an infographic about SimpliFlying and our journey? And that was it. We gathered key statistics about the website from Google Analytics, collated our list of clients and consolidated all the progress we’ve made over the last couple of years in the eye-candy we’re presenting to you right here! Enjoy the visual

Special thanks to Shubhodeep Pal, who has a great eye for detail, and the design team for doing such a fantastic job with this.

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How many times have you read  a whitepaper that introduced new vocabulary to the English language? That too in the aviation industry? Our 2nd ever whitepaper does exactly that (Read the first one: 6 Steps to a Swashbuckling Airline Brand), introducing a concept called “Airrogance”, which is essentially arrogance applied to the airline industry when airlines fail to engage their customers in a two-way relationship. Read on.

Listen first, then engage…
An airline brand experience elicits more emotions in customers than most brand experiences do, based on the excitement generally associated with travel. As a result, customers tend to volunteer strong, detailed opinions about their air travel experiences, often broadcasting them throughout their entire virtual networks via social media. While this new era of engagement has created heightened customer expectations in many cases, it also provides savvy airlines with a unique opportunity to understand what drives their customers’ behavior more than ever before.

The key is to listen first and engage second, rather than continue the lazy habit of focusing strictly on traditional “push” customer communications. In other words, to goal should no …

Dear fellow aviation and branding enthusiasts,
As many of you might be aware, I’ve been at Ft. Lauderdale in Florida today for a keynote presentation at the FTMA/Freddies Conference on the topic I love the most – airline branding and social media. I’ve just done the presentation and received a phenomenal response to it. And I’m sharing it with you here (with the videos included). I’d love to have your inputs too.
P.S: I’ll be Live Tweeting from the Freddie Awards about this year’s winners and you can follow me on Twitter here.
Airlines 2.0 – How airlines can use Web 2.0 for branding
View more presentations from Shashank Nigam.

Image via Wikipedia

In my recent webinar on airline branding, I used the examples of JetBlue Airways to demonstrate how an airline can successfully adopt a holistic Web 2.0 branding strategy. A number of webinar participants wanted to learn more about it, so I got to the heart of the matter.

So that you could hear it from the horse’s mouth, I got in touch with Morgan Johnston, who leads the Twitter initiative at JetBlue Corporate Communications. This is the same Morgan who famously started “following” the popular blogger Jonathan Fields, who got freaked out and wrote a story about it.

Here is an email interview with Morgan, regarding JetBlue’s digital branding strategy and a good behind-the-scenes look at how JetBlue does it.

SimpliFlying: Who’s the driving force behind the technology initiatives at JetBlue, and how big is the team?

Morgan: Responsibility for our online initiatives span many groups, from our brand, sales, or web teams, to corporate communications, or customer service.  We each have different requirements and ideas that we bring forward to create an …

Image via CrunchBase

In December last year, as major retailers in the US worried about “Black Friday” not arriving and cash registers not ringing, Amazon.com announced that it had its best year ever. Here’s the story and here are the numbers: Amazon reported that the buying was strongest on December 15 when they received 6.3 million orders, which according to the Dow Jones translates to a “record 72.9 items a second.” And this is not the first time Amazon has bucked the recessionary trend.
Amazon’s brand matters
The reason for Amazon’s success? It’s the Amazon brand that has done the work here. Had Amazon not established strong brand loyalty in good times, the customers wouldn’t have stood by it in bad times.  More importantly, everything about Amazon is based around customer experience, and everything is marketed to the customer well.

So what can airlines learn from the Amazon brand, to beat the recession? Here are three key lessons.
1. Build a distinct airline brand
If Amazon hadn’t established …

 Recently, I was honored to have been interviewed on the very popular Airplane Geeks podcast. The topic was airline branding (what else!) and I had a lot of fun with Courtney and Max - the two certifiable aviation geeks who host the show. You can listen to the whole hour long show by clicking on the “play” button below, or just download my interview from the show here.

Good news for SimpliFlying, and some thanks
Recently, SimpliFlying has been mentioned on a number of websites. Specifically, Popagandhi, 30,000 feet and Bangalore Aviation. Thanks a lot Adrianna, Max and Devesh.

Compliments and feedback have been flooding in after my recent webinar on airline branding. I’d like to specifically thank Jeff Ogden, from Hospitality Interactive Marketing, New York, for inviting me to lead the seminar series and organizing it so professionally. It’s been my best remote-working experience till date.

Thanks for everything guys, and cheers to a great 2009 ahead!

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What a year it has been for the airline industry! It started out in high spirits, until oil prices reached $160 per barrel and claimed airlines globally in its wake. And now, oil prices are predicted to go down to $20! In the midst of all this, some airlines took extreme measures that eroded brand equity, for short-term gain, while some persisted. Only time will tell which will emerge stronger from the recession, though my bets are on the latter.

So, let’s close the year by sharing with you the ten most popular (=most read) SimpliFlying articles of 2008. These actually give a good overview of the year for the industry too. From the great branding practices of Virgin America and lessons for airline from Barack “Change” Obama, to the brilliant Emirates A380 show put up during the first flight to New York. To top it off, the year ended with Qantas and BA going into merger talks.  I’m sure you’ll enjoy revisiting these articles, as much as I enjoyed writing …