Some food for thought…

In my MasterClasses, I often ask, “How long is your brand engagement with a can of Coke? How about with Starbucks?” The answer is about 5 mins for Coke and about 90 mins for Starbucks.

Now, if I were to ask you how long is your brand engagement with an airport? How about an airline? The answer can range from at least two hours to over 24hrs! So why is it that our time spent in an airport (especially after security) is the most boring? How is it that airlines have 24 hrs with their customers captive, and yet service recovery is an issue if something goes wrong? It’s because the old rules of branding that would apply to Coke and Starbucks don’t necessarily apply to airlines and airports!

When we released our white paper on airline branding and introduced the 6X model, the premise was that branding for airlines and airports is different due to the length of brand engagement. What would Coke pay to have a brand engagement of two hours? How much more profit do you think Starbucks would make if the customer sat …

I had the opportunity to deliver a presentation and a MasterClass at the ACI Airport Exchange in Abu Dhabi, on the road ahead for social media for airports around the world.

While I focused on key business goals like driving customer service and non-aeronautical revenue, I shared case studies from this year’s SimpliFlying Award winner London Gatwick and nominee Changi, among others. During the half-day MasterClass, I shared in-depth case studies and gave the participants a feel of how using free tools like socialmention.com and Geochirp.com can make their job easy when trying to engage customers.

I share with you here my Prezi presentation from the conference. A video recording will be posted up soon as well. Would love your comments on this.
 

ACI on Prezi

Update: Winners announced!

And the results have been announced. Some usual suspects taking home the prizes while some smaller players claim an emphatic victory. Click on each category name to see the campaigns that were so keenly contested for these awards.

Best Airport in Social Media

Best Hotel in Social Media

Best Airline driving revenue via social media

Best Airline driving customer service and crisis management via social media

…And finally the big one!

Best Airline in Social Media

Moments from the Awards ceremony
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The wait is over!

Live from Amsterdam, we’re bringing you the 2nd Annual SimpliFlying Awards for Excellence in social media – honoring the best airlines, airports and hotels in the world.

It has been a riveting contest. After 134 nominations and over 31,000 votes, we’re in Amsterdam for the final reckoning. The final shortlisted nominees are geared up to deliver their final pitches. Our three esteemed judges are ready with their marksheets and pencils. You can follow all the live action from the event via …

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 …

Let the voting begin!
After 10 days and 69 nominations (!!) for the best airlines, airports and hotels in social media, the SimpliFlying team and Hotel Marketing Strategies blog has shortlisted the top five finalists for each category for the 2nd Annual SimpliFlying Awards in Social Media Excellence. The “Best Airline in Social Media” had so many high-quality submissions that we just couldn’t bring it down to five.

Anyone on the web is free to vote once in each category and give their favorite airline a shot at glory! Airlines, airports and hotels are free to request for votes through their social media sites, by emailing their frequent fliers and staff or through any other means.

One representative from the Top 3 most voted in each category will also get a free pass to attend the EyeforTravel Online Marketing and Social Media Summit on Oct 10 in Amsterdam, and a 20% discount for their colleagues.
The process

The voting begins immediately, and polls auto-close on 15 Sept, 2011
The top 3 voted in each category will get to make a 10 min presentation …

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 …

Editor’s Note: A day before I spoke about putting the joy back into the airport experience at the Annual ACI Conference in Lisbon, Philippe Scheimann from SOSTravelers.com suggested that he wanted to write a guest article as a follow up to his earlier ‘How to empower stranded travelers‘. We decided that that the next article could be on how to help airports turn stranded travelers into happy consumers. Hence, here is the guest article by Philippe.

This is a very challenging question since, by definition, stranded travelers are in a difficult situation, often far away from home, in a difficult environment where uncertainty is high. Stranded travelers are usually left on their own, airport and airline officials have often no answer to provide because of the inherent uncertain nature of the event and are limited in what they can do to help travelers at a loss for helping the travelers.

The following items may not work for everyone, everywhere. However, they show various directions that will need to be customized and modified according to the specifications of the location, the needs of the travelers and various other parameters.

Let us assume several assumptions to start with:

We are talking about stranded …

This is a guest article by Stephanie Gehman, who leads Marketing at Harrisburg International Airport and contributed this article earlier to SimpliFlying Tribes, an exclusive community of the world’s Top 150 travel marketers. The airport was also featured in our Top 10 airports on social media case-study pack.
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How Harrisburg went social…
At Harrisburg International Airport (MDT), we jumped aboard the social media bandwagon in mid-2008 with a Facebook profile and the fly HIA blog. Since then we have expanded the profile into a business page, we regularly tweet on Twitter, photo share on Flickr, opened our YouTube channel for the aviation geek in all of us, maintain a LinkedIn group, and we’re just getting started with Tumblr.  Combined, these social media platforms help us routinely and intimately serve the needs of several thousand of the travelers in our facility.
The impact social media has had at MDT
The benefits of these platforms are both direct and indirect. Below are six of the most significant benefits …

Note: This is a cross-post from Steven Frischling’s Flying with Fish blog. Steven Frischling, aka: Fish, is a self employed photographer, and founder of The Travel Strategist, who has flown approximately 1,000,000 miles since he began to track his mileage 2005.
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Airports have been seeking new ways to communicate with their passengers for decades. From the original implementation of flip-board arrivals/departures boards through websites with live flight status, airports seek to inform and interact with their passengers.

Until very recently the interaction between airports and their passengers has been one-way. The airport supplying the information and the passengers taking the information. Occasionally there have been post card surveys and website surveys, but opportunity to directly interact with passengers has been extremely limited…until the creation of social media.

Throughout the past year multiple airports have began exploring, instituting and exploiting the potential of social media, primarily the use of Twitter. As I continue to follow a growing list of airports using Twitter, some major airports have signed up then fallen to the wayside, while a number of ‘smaller’ airports have fully embraced the potential of services, such as Twitter.

Of the airports I follow on Twitter I have been most impressed by …