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 …

Our friends at Eezeer have analysed the Twitter habits of airlines as well as their fans/customers for the month of November and have produced the Monthly Twitter Report in continuation with their monthly coverage and analysis of the dynamic social media landscape for airlines.

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:

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.
Delta Air Lines is still the runaway champion, having been consistently been a …

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 …

SimpliFlying is back with the  Monthly Twitter Report for airlines (in partnership with Eezeer) for August 2011 in continuation with our coverage and analysis of the dynamic social media landscape for airlines.
After close to 6 months of reporting monthly on how airlines are using Twitter, we can safely say that apart from Facebook, Twitter is the social media platform of choice for most airlines. The number of tweets sent and received has been rising in general for months in a row. Airlines have also become more forthcoming as well as responsive.
This month, while the usual suspects (Delta and JetBlue) are once again on the list of top engagers, Cebu Pacific absolutely storms into the list. Not only is it placed second on the list of airlines receiving the most number of public tweets, it also scores the highest in the Global Satisfaction Score with a score of 106.7. (For more details, see the infographic.)
A number of facts are immediately clear from this report:

As we’ve mentioned, Cebu Pacific is second on the list of airlines receiving the most number of public tweets with more than 11,000 to its name. However, Delta Air Lines is once …

The buzz is palpable! After a heady round of nominations (69 nominees in 10 days) we’re down to the fun bit – the real voting to shortlist the Top 3 who’ll be invited to Amsterdam on October 10th for the 2nd Annual SimpliFlying Awards for Excellence in Social Media. Amazingly, we received more than 5000 votes in the first 36 hours from more than 1400 cities across the world. Huge, huge numbers! And they’re growing astronomically each day!

To acquaint you better with the nominees in each category of the awards, we’ll be posting case-packs on our SlideShare channel for each of the 5 categories of awards detailing what makes each nominee so special and why they’re in the final list of nominees (the initial list had over 60 candidates!). The campaigns that clinched each airline its position of prestige will be illustrated in detail. We hope you enjoy going through them and revelling in the reflected brilliance of their innovativeness, cleverness and sheer chutzpah.

The first case-pack has 5 case-studies, each illumninating the campaigns of Top 5 nominees in the category “Best use of Social Media to drive Revenue”. As you’ll see, some, like Virgin America jumped …

As I checked in on Foursquare at Washington Dulles Airport this morning on my way to Chicago, I couldn’t help but notice the following display at one of the idle United gates:

In light of the article I wrote in this space a few months ago, I must say I was quite proud. Since I wrote that first article, UA has merged their Twitter presence with Continental (and are actually still tweeting from both), but it’s nice to see them complete the message by including the Twitter handle this time. Glad somebody’s paying attention…and well done, United!
This is how it looked previously on their napkins!

Social technologies are gaining huge traction among airlines. There’s simply no denying it. A couple of months ago, we released an infographic that showed how airlines are dedicating resources to social media. Most major airlines, according to the infographic, already have social media teams in place – most are managing cross-departmental strategies. Some even have plans to expand their teams later this year. That infographic was deemed to be a truly important one as far as the topic of airlines in social media was concerned: it received over 100,000 views and was featured in a number of publications including twice on Mashable itself!
Make sense of the chaos
Now, to add to all the hullaballoo, it really doesn’t help that social technologies are not just adding newer features regularly, but new social technologies themselves are being launched a dime a dozen (any takers for Google+ in airlines?).

So if you’re an airline marketer and thinking really hard about which social technologies to adopt apart from the usual suspects, we have the perfect remedy for your troubles. In fact, even if you’ve figured out which social platforms to adopt, you might still be wondering how best to use them or …

It’s official. As of July 2011, there are 191 airlines on Twitter, while only 179 airlines have loyalty programs. The first loyalty program came into existence 30 years ago, in the form of AAdvantage by American Airlines, while the first airlines on Twitter joined just 5o months ago: jetBlue and Delta in May 2007. And what a journey it has already been!

SimpliFlying is back with the Monthly Twitter Report (in partnership with Eezeer) for July 2011 in continuation with our coverage and analysis of the dynamic social media landscape for airlines.

A number of facts are immediately clear from this report:

Airlines are using Twitter more than ever before. The number of tweets increased by 51% from March 2011 to July 2011.
However, most of the tweets are being sent out by a small number of the airlines on Twitter. To be precise, 30 airlines account for 84% of the tweets, which is up from 26 providing 80% of the tweets in the May report.
Delta Air Lines still sends and receives the most number of tweets, which has been the trend since the first report. However, while the response rate to public tweets may seem like a paltry …

SimpliFlying is back with the Monthly Twitter Report (in partnership with Eezeer) for June 2011 in continuation with our coverage and analysis of the dynamic social media landscape for airlines.
A number of facts are immediately clear from this report:

Airlines are using Twitter more than ever before. The number of tweets increased by 39% from March 2011 to June 2011. That’s a rather impressive jump!
However, most of the tweets are being sent out by a small number of the airlines on Twitter. To be precise, 26 airlines account for 80% of the tweets.
Delta Airlines is the breakaway champion in terms of receiving tweets addressed to them. They received almost twice as many tweets as the airline with the second-highest inbound tweets.
Airlines are listening to travellers more than ever. They follow almost 600,000 people on Twitter as compared to the nearly 7 million people following airline Twitter accounts.
Airlines receive almost 6x as many tweets as they send out. Why do you think is there such a disparity? Are airline having difficulty managing their resources or do most inbound tweets not merit a response (eg irrelevant rants, indirect conversations etc)?

For more insights, check out the infographic below and let us know what …

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 …