I came across a profound article on MSNBC Travel by Chris Elliot (of the elliot.org fame) about social media and travel, and I couldn’t help but re-post it here. Chris mentions six ways in which travel will change thanks to social media. And to me, it seems inevitable, as you’d have realized if you’d seen the slides from my recent keynote on the topic in Miami. I’m sure you’d enjoy this read.
P.S: Yours truly is quoted in the article as well (point 3).
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By Christopher Elliott
Travel columnist
msnbc.com contributor
updated 10:32 a.m. ET, Mon., July 6, 2009
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31727411/ns/travel-tips/
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Christopher Elliott
Travel columnist
• Profile
• // E-mail//
Before the latest social media revolution, Jessica Gottlieb would have probably watched helplessly when her kids, Jane and Alexander, were trapped on the tarmac, waiting for their Virgin America flight to take off.
But that’s so 2008. When it …
I delivered an Expert Keynote address yesterday to a room full of senior airline executives on how they can us social media to enhance their brands. This was at the at the LCC World Americas Summit in Miami, FL.
The presentation details why social media is important to LCCs and how they can use it immediately for customer service, sales and more. I’m sharing the slides here and would love to have your feedback on this!
Once in a while, I get a chance to meet a person who totally knows what he’s talking about, and the world knows what he’s talking about too. Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan on Twitter) is such a man.
In this exclusive interview, Chris Brogan, the social media mogul (yeah, not just any guru, but a mogul) is put in the hotseat of an airline CEO. He shares with us what he’d do to run the airline, how he’d implement Web 2.0 strategies at the airline to build the brand and how he’d make them work for the airline and for the customer.
As the CEO of an airline, Chris Brogan would…
Optimize customer service – by providing virtual concierge service
In the past, operational optimization has been the name of the game. But Chris has a different take on the running of an airline – focus on providing customer service.
“Now, there’s a need to understand that customer service is an opportunity house, not a cost center. Use social media to reach people where they are, to give them what they’re asking for, to forge a new relationship that goes beyond my gates, my dates and my planes.”
Tap on social …
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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Businesses are engaging in ’social media’ at a breakneck pace, but how many are using these tools effectively?
Recently, JetBlue Airways and Southwest Airlines sat down together at the annual Media Relations Summit in New York City to co-host the “New Tools for Communicating Directly with Customers” session. The two airlines, which are competitors, but not direct competitors on many routes, have a similar philosophy and approach to engaging customers in the use of interactive communications tools.
Throughout JetBlue & Southwest’s session I had the opportunity to directly interact with and communicate with marketing professionals from around the world to specifically discuss the effective use of Twitter in marketing. Specifically, as you might have guessed it, my focus was on airlines and their direct customer interaction.
So where does this lead us? To the discussion of how airlines are using Twitter correctly and more importantly incorrectly.
Almost exactly …
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 …
AirTran, the American low-cost carrier, announced a couple of days back that it’s launching wifi on every single one of its 136 planes by mid-July. It wasn’t just the scale or speed of the implementation that startled many, but also how the announcement was preceded by a very innovative social media brand campaign.
And I took this opportunity to bring SimpliFlying’s readers up, close and personal with the brain behind this campaign – the Creative Director for the Everyflight.com project, Pat Hanna.
What was Everyflight.com about?
Over the last three weeks, AirTran has been running a teaser promotion asking their customers what they would want to see on every flight. The integrated teaser and launch campaign was developed in partnership with Cramer-Krasselt, Chicago, and was supported by TV spots, radio, Internet banners, out-of-home and airport signage.
At the heart of the effort was www.everyflight.com where people could make their own suggestions, vote “boo!” or “yah!” on previous submissions, view charts and graphs including a leader board and poll map, and sign up for a chance to win a seat on every flight. Upwards of 230,000 votes have been cast and …
Image by brentdanley via Flickr
Did you know that JetBlue has over 507,000 followers on Twitter? (as of 13 May, 2009). Yes, that’s more than half a million “fans” of the brand who choose to be exposed to the airline’s 140 character-long short messages. And this is almost 20 times greater than the second most followed airline, Southwest, which has just over 27,000 followers. But why? What is it that JetBlue does that makes it such a loved brand on Twitter?
I did some basic analysis and here are some stats for those of you who like numbers. Of the last 62 messages JetBlue sent out,
42 were replies to others (68%)
33 contained external links (53%)
12 were free tips, like how to overcome jetlag (20%)
10 answered customer service queries (16%)
9 had sales offers/promotions of some sort (14%)
6 were Re-tweets (including one from SimpliFlying!) (10%)
It’s NOT just about selling on Twitter
The numbers tell a story. Do you realize that the overwhelming majority of messages were interacting with individuals, as they were replies. And there were …
I have another confession to make. I haven’t been on Virgin America, and I really want to try it! (the first confession was a couple of weeks back that I haven’t been on Southwest, and that I wanted to meet the rapping flight attendant). Why the sudden burst of emotions? Well, because I just watched an interview of Richard Branson in one of those purple-blue cabins and I was mesmerized, yet again.
Why is it all the rave? Thanks to The Nerdist.
Because this time, Richard was interviewed by Chris Hardwick, “The Nerdist“, and Chris has been generating lots of comments on the interview, been Tweeting about it and making a lot more fans for the airline than probably a Virgin America advertisement in the morning daily would have. Why am I so sure? May be because on Twitter, Chris has 20 times the “followers” that Virgin America has! And I bet his website gets more hits than the Virgin America website too.
The point I’m trying to make? Airlines are in the service business, and not in the transport business. And because of that, airlines cannot shy away from social media anymore. Be it working with …
Singapore Airlines has created probably the most well recognized airline brand in the world. The Singapore Girl has done great wonders for the airline and the nation over the years. Even ardent competitors like the CEO of AirAsia, Tony Fernandes, openly claim to be learning from the airline.
But the recent tough times have hit the airline hard, just like other premium carriers like Cathay Pacific. Singapore Airlines has decided to cut over 200 flights and is experiencing low load-factors in its premium classes – where it makes most of its money. So the big looming question is what should the airline do now? Change strategy? Probably not. How about using social media to soften the impact, by engaging the customers and employees real-time? Why not?
You can run, but you can’t hide
In my conversations with folks over at Singapore Airlines (quite a few of them!), I’ve sensed educated-nonchalance when it comes to adopting social media to pursue its business goals in this downturn. Not only are they hardly present on social media outlets, the airline seems unconvinced about the importance of a two-way conversation. SIA doesn’t have a blog, Twitter account, Facebook page or even social-media-friendly press releases (I …
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.
