——

A year ago, the mobile photo social network Instagram had less than ten million users.  Yet it was growing faster than Facebook or Twitter were at comparable periods.

As a result, it attracted a fair amount of attention, and a few early adopter airline brands signed up, recognising the obvious link between travel and people taking and sharing pictures with their mobile phones. Fast-forward and the now Facebook-owned network has over fifty million users.   However, most airlines still don’t have a presence and many that do are using it sporadically and inconsistently.

We scanned through Instagram to look for 20 airline feeds so we could put together a comparative report.  In fact, even coming up with 20 airlines on Instagram wasn’t as straight-forward as we thought, as a number of major players are notable by their absence.

The infographic we’ve commissioned (see below) shows Air Asia leads in followers, bmibaby on activity and British Airways in likes.  It also throws up a few questions about how most airlines use Instagram and how they could use it more effectively.

To take a few feeds as examples:

• British Airways (@british_airways).   BA recently generated a fair amount of excitement on Instagram due to showing off the 787 Dreamliner.  In general, it uses it as a visual news feed.  Events, staff, planes, souvenirs and so on, which seems to be well received. The average number of likes is very high (an average of 250+ per post for the last ten), despite the feed having posted a little over 50x.  Clearly this is something BA could take advantage of, and make more of.
• Air Asia (@airasia) seems to use Instagram to try and get across the essence of the brand, via shots of the people who work there, including Airline boss Tony Fernandes.  It works – their Instagram account is very large (almost 15,000 followers) and they are extensively posted about on the network.
• Air France (@airfrance).  Air France’s Instagram account is a mix of everything – new routes, retro gear and destination pics.   At the end of last year, Air France also ran a #spotairfrance competition in the UK, France and Switzerland.   This was a competition for people to upload posts of their Air France experience, and tag them #spotairfrance. With 377 posts being submitted around the competition, Air France is still one of the few airlines to have used Instagram to encourage actual interaction from its followers via a competition or promotion.
• American Airlines (@americanair).   American Airlines posted sporadically until earlier this year, when it started uploading pictures of its new seats.   Since 7 March the feed has been quiet though.   Has there really been nothing to say at an airline as large as American for two months?

You’d be hard pressed to find Lufthansa, Alitalia or Iberia on Instagram, but you can find Russian airline Aeroflot (@aeroflot).  By and large the feed is made up of plane shots, but the fact that it posts fairly consistently already puts Aeroflot ahead of most other airlines on Instagram, and it deserves more than its 87 followers.

At Rabbit we’ve worked with both bmi and bmibaby, and this is what we did with their accounts:

We took on the bmi (@flybmi) feed earlier in the year with a brief to grow followers (at the time 200) and engagement and also to showcase destinations in line with the bmi Spring sale.   Edit challenges (take a master image and enhance it) are part of Instagram culture, and so we set up a weekly #bmieditchallenge around different destinations from Amman to Vienna.   We received almost 1000 posts in response, and grew the account five-fold to over 1000 followers.

bmibaby.  bmibaby may be the smallest airline on the list, but it is also the most active, having posted 228 times.

Our strategy was to use Instagram to showcase bmibaby destinations and also to build up relationships with influencers on the network.  As a result, we rolled out a six month campaign called My Europe, which resulted in over 35,000 destination photos being submitted, supplemented by Instagram inspired online destination guides and “insta-meets” (real world Instagram exchanges).

So what should airlines be doing?   A few things in particular:

1 – Make Instagram feeds dynamic rather than static.  With exceptions such as Air France, bmi and bmibaby, most airline Instagram feeds are one-way and don’t encourage fans to post their own images.   Encouraging engagement doesn’t always have to involve competitions or promotions.   A very simple thing airlines could do is to use the ‘repost’ function on Statigram (a web service linked to Instagram) to showcase a fan photo of the week – this is something we do for Gatwick Airport.

2 – Give the feed a theme.   What’s your Instagram feed for?   Most airline accounts are a mixed bagged and are a bit of everything.

Air Asia’s account works (and has amassed 15k followers) because a decision has clearly been taken to show the human side of the business – the staff.   Similarly, Aeroflot uses its feed to show off its planes and could probably quickly increase its following by tapping into the active ‘AV Geek’ community on social media.  Like with other social media channels, there needs to be a content strategy and plan.

3 – Look out for the quality of images. We noticed that a lot of airlines use their Instagram feeds a little like they would Twitpic – the photo service that allows you to attach images to tweets.   In fact, Instagram and other photo-sharing networks like Tadaa and Streamzoo have sold themselves on their in-app filters, which significantly enhance ordinary photos.   Again, a number of airlines seem to take care and attention with what they post, one example is SAS (@flysas)

4 – Be consistent.   Once you have created your Instagram account, have a content timetable and be consistent.   A few feeds we looked at had obviously created their Instagram account and then done nothing with it – in one high profile case since Christmas.   As with other social channels, you build engagement and follower by being visible and showing you are committed to the network and community.

The fact is Instagram and other up and coming photo sharing networks like Tadaa, Streamzoo and EyeEm can be powerful tools in an airline’s social media arsenal.   They can be very effective in sourcing good  user generated content, they can showcase destinations, they are good for visualising major news events and they are good for engaging a community that very often won’t be found on other social channels.

To end with, some more stats:  In the US and UK most mobile phones are now smartphones, with cameras as good as some entry level digital cameras.   In the USA, more smartphones (150 million) will sell than all cameras combined.   In the US, the % of pictures taken with a smartphone jumped from 17% in 2010 to 27% in 2011.   The most popular camera on Flickr has for a while now been the iPhone.   As an airline, your business is inherently visual.  Isn’t this a trend you should be taking advantage of?

• How BmiBaby Used Instagram to Visually Engage Travelers and Locals
• How airlines and airports can dramatically increase engagement on their Facebook Pages through one simple action
• Vote for the SimpliFlying Hero of April 2012: bmibaby vs JetBlue vs Virgin Atlantic
• What will bring Russian airline brands out of their slumber? In conversation with industry expert Stuart Barwood
• Airline brands must understand that social media is like a BBQ cookout party

In many respects, Facebook takes the limelight when it comes to looking at how an airline is engaging with the community. However, over the past couple of years Twitter has inadvertently become the public helpdesk for brands around the world. Many airlines have been quick to establish a presence here to ensure that where ever there are questions and praise (and to some extent, complaints) a representative is there is respond in 140 characters.

US airlines, like many other US brands, have been quick to build their Twitter teams and are blazing a trail for many other global airlines to follow. SimpliFlying and Unmetric decided to dig a little deeper using the Unmetric platform to see if there is a clear leader or whether all airlines are doing a similar job. We collected and analyzed the data for the last thirty days to discover the benchmarks around which other airlines can compare themselves.

Volume of Tweets

JetBlue is often held up as the darling of Twitter but when it comes to raw number of Tweets, both DeltaAssist (Delta’s dedicated customer-service channel on Twitter) and American Airlines beat them hands down. The customer support channel for Delta handles more than twice the number of questions than JetBlue. In terms of raw numbers, all seven airlines sent a total of 11,398 tweets in the last 30 days – that’s an average of 16 tweets per hour.

Fingers on the Buzzers

The aviation industry has some of the best response times of any sector but blazing a trail for others to follow is Delta Assist. The Twitter team at Delta managed to respond to 4,235 questions in the last 30 days with an average response time of just 11 minutes. They’ve either got some speedy typers or an army of people with their fingers on the buzzers waiting to reply.

Both US Airways and United are using their Twitter accounts to provide customer support but are not able to match the likes of Delta and JetBlue at the moment. It’ll be interesting to keep an eye on their response times to see if it comes down in the next few months.

Round The Clock Service

Out of the seven airlines we analyzed, only JetBlue and Delta Assist appear to have 24/7 operations. We used EST as the reference time and when we aggregated all the tweets it produced the revealing graph below. Clearly for most airlines, their Twitter support is a 12 hour operation. It’s possible that the data is skewed a little bit because the airlines will have their Twitter teams in different timezones, but most seem to be operating between 9am and 6pm EST.

With US Airways’ 8 hour response time, it crossed my mind whether their operations are in the right timezone. If most of their customers are from the West coast they could have a long wait if they post in the afternoon as the Twitter team will have all gone home for the day.

A Tweet By Tweet Breakdown

It’s interesting to see that nearly all US airlines are using Twitter as a customer support channel rather than a platform to promote themselves. Only Virgin America and Southwest Air are actively putting fresh content out on Twitter while the other 5 are focused almost exclusively on replying to customers. Delta have gone down the same road as Dell with road of one account for brand news and one purely for support and with the volume of tweets they send it’s probably a good idea. As more and more brands create dedicated support accounts on Twitter it might only be a matter of time before JetBlue and American Air decide to set up their standalone ‘support’ account.

Most airlines certainly seem to know that in order to manage their reputation online they need to be where the conversations are happening. Delta Assist are, in our opinion, laying down the benchmark for the sector with their lightning quick response times while sending the most number of tweets. JetBlue has always been the poster child for brands that get Twitter, but if Delta Assist continues to set the benchmarks, we might have to hold up a new king of Twitter.

Find out more about how Unmetric can help your airline benchmark its social media prowess here. Or drop us a line directly at unmetric@simpliflying.com. Look out for even more exciting stuff from our collaboration with Unmetric in the days to come!

You can see previous posts by Unmetric here.

• Airlines on Twitter Monthly Report for July 2011 reveals that more airlines have Twitter accounts than loyalty programs
• Delta Assist brings airline customer service to Facebook
• How airlines and airports can dramatically increase engagement on their Facebook Pages through one simple action
• Airlines on Twitter Monthly Report for August 2011: Cebu Pacific joins the big league and scores high!
• Airlines on Twitter in June 2011: Delta Airlines is the breakaway “listening and talking champion”

However, regardless of whether the crisis is something the airline did to itself , an uncontrollable natural phenomenon or a strike, there is always a need to reach large numbers of people as quickly as possible, providing information, answering their questions and avoiding the spread of false rumors.

In today’s increasingly connected world, social media has proven to be the crisis management tool, and has been used successfully by both airlines and airports in a wide range of scenarios. The reason for its effectiveness is based on two factors: the first is that it allows the kind of mass communication and information dissemination that we mentioned earlier, and the second is that they are the place where an increasing percentage of users go to complain and seek information.

At SimpliFlying we’ve accumulated a wealth of experience consulting in social-media based crisis management strategies for both airlines and airports and, as our readers will know, we have even dedicated a section of our website to this subject and created an infographic for easy reference.  Today we’ve collected the best case studies on crisis management in one case-pack. Enjoy!

Planning is crucial to managing crises. Does your airline or airport team need a primer in handling crises via social media? We can help! Write to us at contact@simpliflying.com.

• Why Airlines (and Airports) must shift to Social Customer Service
• Crises Management for airlines and airports in the age of social media- Presentation from ACI Europe
• The Best Airlines Driving Customer Service & Crisis Management Through Social Media: Top 5 SimpliFlying Awards nominees
• How airlines used social media innovatively to battle the ashcloud crisis [from Mashable]
• Top 10 Airports on Social Media – case studies of the airports best at driving engagement

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 8^th 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 another Top 10, this time focusing on the use airlines made of Twitter, one of the fastest growing social networks of the year.

6. Social media ROI: The second half of our roundup us opened by keynote presentation made by our CEO Shashank Nigam at the Social Media Travel Summit earlier this year. The keynote focuses on a much talked about and little understood topic, the ROI of social media.

5. In fifth place is one of our most popular infographics, focusing on the resources that airlines dedicate to social media.

4. Airline Facebook initiatives: Our Top 10 case-packs have been one of the most viewed resources on our website and in the fourth place of this roundup we find another one illustrating the best examples of Facebook contests run by airlines.

3. 6X Model of Airline Branding: In third place we present a long standing favorite of our readers, the Airline Branding Whitepaper. This much praised paper was written by our CEO Shashank Nigam back in 2008. Yes, light years away in social media time, and was also selected and re-published by Brandchannel.com in the summer of the same year. Three years later it is still extremely relevant and, as this roundup shows, one of the most visited pages of our website.

2. Future of loyalty programs is social: In the second place comes one of our best infographic to date, highlighting the social future of loyalty programs and the new tendencies of the connected frequent flyers.

1. A380s and sales problems: In the first position, we have an article that was the most read in 2011, even though it was actually written in August 2009. We are talking, of course, of our famous piece on the Singapore Airlines’ A380 Suites and the sales problems that followed their introduction.

That said, if you have read this far you clearly have an interest in us. Similarly, we too are interested in our readers. We’d love you to use the comment box below to tell us what you would like to see (or not see) on SimpliFlying in 2012.

Thanks for reading SimpliFlying! Have a great New Year and here’s wishing you a fantastic 2012!

• The Top 10 SimpliPresentations – Celebrating 200,000+ views on SimpliFlying’s SlideShare channel
• Top 50 case-studies of airlines and airports excelling in social media
• KLM reaffirms its social media leadership with its innovative Stewardess Yourself app
• A revamped SimpliFlying Heroes initiative – Vote for the Jan 2012 Hero now!
• [Infographic] How travel marketers calculate ROI on social media and why the future is mobile

At the close of the year, it’s worth pausing to consider how quickly the social landscape has evolved over the past year or so. Airlines have not only embraced Twitter but have also realised that there’s great value in using it to drive specific goals such as revenue, engagement and loyalty. Many innovative initiatives on Twitter have been captured in our Top 10 case-packs as well. It’s worth noting that as of November 2011 there were 198 airlines on Twitter with 90 actively tweeting. This, more than anything else, is a sign of changing times and even greater change to come.

A number of facts are immediately clear from this report:

1. Even though most airlines have jumped on to the Twitter bandwagon, the majority of the tweets are produced by a minority of airlines. 30 airlines provide more than 83% of tweets sent out by airlines.
2. Delta Air Lines is still the runaway champion, having been consistently been a Listening and Talking champion (in terms of tweets received and sent). Air Asia and Southwest make a belated, but expected entry to the list. However, American Airlines makes a surprise appearance on the Talking Champions list.
3. Airlines are definitely using Twitter more intensively with each passing day. Over the past 6 months, the number of outgoing tweets increased by around 38%.
4. As the weather begins to turn unpredictable, it’s that time of the year again when people feel hassled while flying. This was quite evident as “baggage handling” was a trending topic as the number of tweets related to it  increased by about 28% in the last month.
5. Over 1.2 million tweets have been exchanged between airlines and their customers on Twitter in the past six months. That’s a heck of a lot!

It’ll certainly be interesting to come back to this report at the end of the next year and see how things have progressed!

For more insights, check out the infographic below and let us know what you thought about it. Is there something ?that resonates with you? Or maybe it doesn’t? Comment or tweet us @simpliflying and let us know. You can view more airline infographics here.

(Click here to download a larger image)

Note: The airlines on Twitter report is produced by eezeerdatalab.

• Airlines on Twitter Monthly Report for July 2011 reveals that more airlines have Twitter accounts than loyalty programs
• Airlines on Twitter in June 2011: Delta Airlines is the breakaway “listening and talking champion”
• Airlines on Twitter Monthly Report for August 2011: Cebu Pacific joins the big league and scores high!
• Eezeer and SimpliFlying launch airline monthly twitter report – Delta leads Twitter use, and customer service is in!
• [Infographic] Airlines on Twitter – April 2011 data reveals the need to focus on Customer Service

The benefits of crowdsourcing, and its effectiveness for problem solving, are well-known. The power of the social web is being harnessed by airlines more than ever (in fact, a cargo-carrier has recently got into the game as well). Crowdsourcing initiatives are now being used not  just to engage customers but also to find ways to improve their product and services, as well as at the same time building their brands. Hence, “crowdbranding”.

With today’s Top 10 case-pack we would like to highlight some of the best examples of airline crowdsourcing. At the same time, we also invite our readers to have a look beyond the surface and into the deeper strategic goals that drive each of these strategies. In some cases it will be clear that the end game was indeed solving a problem or finding an innovative way of addressing existing issues, but in others it will also be clear that the stated goal of the crowdsourcing campaign wasn’t the only goal.

Most of the airline examples included in this Top 10 used crowdsourcing to solve problems related to visible parts of their product such as in-flight meals or routes, and did so in very “socially active” ways, using their social media pages and often creating dedicated websites where participants could interact.

Looking deeper into the reasons that drove these airlines to choose crowdsourcing, we found that the most common goals were:

1. Solving a particular problem
2. Reducing costs
3. Associating their brands with a specific concept (for example: quality or low prices)
4. Obtaining first hand-data from their community of users
5. Promoting a new feature/product/route

With this teaser, we’ll leave you to discover how some of the best airlines in the world harnessed the power of the web in the most tantalizing and innovative ways possible.

• Loyalty 2.0 | The Top 10 Social Loyalty Initiatives by Airlines
• Top 50 case-studies of airlines and airports excelling in social media
• The Top 10 Viral Videos by Airlines (plus bonus videos)
• The Top 10 Twitter Initiatives by Airlines
• Top 10 Travel Distribution Initiatives by Airlines: Reinventing the booking cycle to drive revenue (from #eftamerica)

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 offers some numbers) brands must not only differentiate themselves but also focus their efforts on driving specific business goals. If they don’t, they’ll be relegated to the backwaters of social media.

It turns out that our ceaseless advice and suggestions have not gone unheeded. More airlines than ever before are now using social media as a platform to drive business goals such as crisis management (see our recent case-study on Delta Airlines), revenue (examples abound in our Top 10 series) and now, a much more challenging aim, to drive loyalty via social media.

You should create a loyalty initiative for your airline too!

The challenge in creating a social loyalty initiative is that you really need to be sure of what will click with customers. After all, the goal is to increase loyalty which requires reciprocation from the customers. The good thing is that there are potentially infinite ways (if you’re imaginative enough) of creating a successful initiative. What you need to keep in mind is that most customers will become more loyal based on two things: rewards or recognition (or both).  Our case-pack will illustrate the diverse ways in which this is being done by some of the major airline across the world.

The benefits of creating a successful social loyalty initiatives are manifold:

1. A brand advocate with a strong social network could act as a huge multiplier for your loyalty efforts by getting members from his network involved with the brand.
2. There is a huge opportunity to move away from traditional loyalty programmes and offer something disruptive and innovative.
3. Loyal customers are worth more than new customers (this is true for traditional loyalty programmes as well).
4. The biggest benefit: there is very little lag between implementation and measurement. The results can be seen very quickly indeed.

Without further ado, we present to you our list of the Top 10 Social Loyalty Initiatives by Airlines.

What did you think of this list? Felt we left out someone? Felt this was perfect and want to reward us for our efforts?

We’d love to hear your thoughts! Do join in the discussion and tweet us @simpliflying.

• Is social loyalty the next phase of development for frequent flyer programs?
• [Presentation] Why the future of loyalty programs will be social-media based
• Five Reasons for low cost airlines to take loyalty seriously
• “Crowdbranding”: The Top 10 Crowdsourcing initiatives by Airlines
• KLM reaffirms its social media leadership with its innovative Stewardess Yourself app

Alice Liu, American Airlines’ Managing Director of Onboard Products, remembers something completely different from her first flight as a 13-year-old, and remembers it so fondly that it helped fuel her desire to work in the airline industry. Despite the nerves and excitement of moving with her family to a new and unfamiliar world across the Pacific, and the experience of seeing the tops of those fluffy, white clouds for the first time, what did Alice remember most about her 18-hour-trek from Taipei to Dallas via LAX? The food, of course.

That’s right. Good old, economy class airplane food, which she enjoyed so much that she asked for a second helping. If I can read your thoughts right now, you must either think that someone so passionate about airline food (!!!) is either flat-out nuts, or a match made in heaven for the job she does for American. Based on my experience on-board the delivery flight of American’s first Next-Generation Boeing 737-800, featuring the innovative Boeing Sky Interior, I’ll vouch for the latter.

A dazzling new plane, inspired by the 787 Dreamliner

With an effortless lift off of Boeing Field’s runway 13R, American took possession of its new baby earlier this week, carrying 20-some staff, journalists and special guests on-board the three hour and 22 minute flight to Dallas-Fort Worth. The Seattle sun even made a rare morning appearance, perhaps a fitting foreshadowing to the future satisfaction of frequent AA flyers, thanks to the carrier’s fleet modernization plan that will see them take on 54 more Next-Gen 737-800s over the next two years.

The newest addition to American’s fleet offers increased fuel efficiency (up to 2%), more overhead bin space (up to 54 more bags than its original 737s), themed LED lighting (ceiling and side lights that range from blue to white to amber depending on the time of day and service being performed), newly designed seats and power ports throughout the cabin. The latter features are just like the 787 (watch a cabin tour). While these all seem like amenities that will please even the most demanding passenger, at a price tag in the USD $80 million range, its critical that an airline gets every detail exactly right. Fortunately, American has Alice and her team on its side.

An eye for detail, in-flight

While the beautiful new aircraft will be introduced into mainline AA service on June 1^st, the process from conception to delivery was much longer than any trip the shiny airplane will ever take. Alice’s group has spent years poring over every last detail of the plane’s interior, from the look and texture of the dual mini-tables in each First Class seat to the flexibility of the leather head rests in Economy to the panels covering the ventilation system throughout the cabin. According to Alice, the new First Class seats alone have undergone a four-year development process.

That doesn’t come as a surprise when you consider the challenge involved in figuring out the preferences of some 105 million passengers a year, which often can be as fickle as the Dallas weather. To illustrate this, Liu mentioned a study American had done a few years ago that found that customers wanted healthier onboard snack options. So American added pricey fruits and vegetables to the menu, and subsequently performed its highly-scientific “trash test”—just keeping an eye of what snacks were coming back from the aircraft untouched. The verdict? When it came to making a decision onboard, the same passengers who responded that they wanted healthier snack options preferred the same old cookies.

Nonetheless, Liu’s group, which is responsible for the cabin interior, in-flight entertainment, food & beverage (of course!) and onboard retail, works tirelessly to engage and respond to American’s customer base. While her team does collaborate extensively with Boeing in working out some final design details on the product side, taking care of every other onboard detail for a fleet of about 650 aircraft is obviously a massive undertaking, and one that I never truly appreciated until being the first to walk onboard a brand new, fresh-off-the-production line, Next Generation aircraft.

“Design is all about the details,” Alice says. “It’s the thoughtful details that really complete the travel experience.”

Which seems like a fitting viewpoint from someone who, despite the slender stature she carries, is still known to sneak in an extra meal from time to time. While the instant noodles of her Taipei-to-Dallas adventure may have been replaced by king prawns and artisan cheeses, Alice’s eye for detail is as keen as it was at 13, and that passion permeates throughout every little detail onboard the newest addition to American’s fleet.

Here’s the full interview with Alice we managed to shoot while in the actual 737 itself! Enjoy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Will Delta and Northwest merger bring back the glory of Pan-Am?
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• Singapore Airlines, still a great way to fly? A brand analysis
• What makes the Boeing 787 Dreamliner a brand differentiator? Video tour
• Exclusive Video: Bombardier CSeries cabin tour – a glimpse into the future of flying

In late February, I spoke at the Loyalty11 conference, where a majority of the leading airline loyalty executives gather annually. This year, it was held in Dallas, and I managed to round up some key experts in airline loyalty business – from the stalwart AAdvantage program, to the soon-to-be started AirAsia’s loyalty program. And asked them just one question – what will have an impact on the future of airline loyalty. Here’s what they had to say:

Click here to view the embedded video.

What does the future of airline loyalty programs hold?

Looking through my notes from the conference, here are five indications towards the future (including some quotable quotes from the conference):

1. “Loyalty is no longer defined by the repeat customer” – Tom Klein – President, Sabre
2. There are three customer segments: the satisfied customer, the dis-satisfied customer and the loyalty customer. It’s the first airlines should try to convert to the last
3. Airlines will only get a share of wallet if they have a share of heart
4. The feedback airline loyalty programs get from social media channels than traditional feedback forms – Ryan Green, Southwest Airlines
5. It will be interesting to sort loyalty members by their Klout scores (twitter influence) – Gabi Kool, Voila Rewards

• [Infographic] The future of loyalty programs will be powered by social media
• The Business of Loyalty: SimpliExclusive Interview with Gabi Kool, CEO of Baltic Miles, reveals a changing loyalty landscape
• Five lessons from the most innovative loyalty programs in the world – Inspired from Loyalty 2010
• Three keys to making loyalty programs work for the airline brand of the future
• Is social loyalty the next phase of development for frequent flyer programs?

I just encountered such a person. His name is Tim Feyer, and just by looking at his last 15 tweets, I’m able to tell a log about him.

1. He’s an Executive Platinum on American Airlines’ AAdvantage
2. He’s flown 100,000 miles in the last two months, almost all on AA and over 3 Mn lifetime miles!
3. He almost always only travels First or Business Class
4. He always uses the Admirals Club
5. He’s engaging with other fliers on Twitter, and actively sharing his own experiences and helping them out

Now, I’m sure American Airlines has a ton of information about Tim in their AAdvantage database – but do they know how active he’s been on Twitter? Probably not. In fact, after speaking at the Loyalty11 Conference and the Social Media in Travel Conference in February/March, I don’t think most airlines are yet able to differentiate their frequent fliers amongst the hundreds of thousands of social media fans and followers they’re acquiring. And that’s where the goldmine is.

Imagine, if American Airlines is able to identify Tim and more like him…here are some of the things they can do:

1. Create a Twitter list of all frequent fliers who do more than X amount of miles per year  -  Tim would probably top that list!
2. Treat this segment differently than other fans – all of their @mentions or comments should be replied to within an hour or two, their praises re-tweeted etc
3. Make special gestures – EG, Tim seems to feel ripped off by parking in Miami – send him some free parking coupons for next time! (learn from KLM Surprises
4. Clear any misunderstandings right away – in his latest tweet, Tim seems to suggest that Admirals Club agent misguided him – why not reach out to him and rectify it?
5. It seems that in case of some fliers like Tim, Twitter or Facebook may be the preferred means of interaction – so, why not complement that with emails? Conversion rate may be higher!

These are just some ideas into the future of airline CRM? What do you think? Take a look at Tim’s tweets, and decide for yourself

• American Airlines’ AAdvantage Facebook Fans grow 84 fold in 54 hours. The most successful campaign ever by an airline?
• Virgin Atlantic’s Vtravelled gets into social gaming – Interview with Lysette Gauna
• Is social loyalty the next phase of development for frequent flyer programs?
• Randy Petersen of Flyertalk on airline branding – Part 1 of 2
• Five clever ways to earn frequent flier miles for upgrades