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 …

Continuing our coverage and analysis of the dynamic social media landscape for airlines, we’ve released the May 2011 Airlines on Twitter report with Eezeer. Data around airlines on Twitter this month reveals a few stark facts:

99.9% of all tweets are about service item issues – like flight delays, baggage inquiries and other customer service issues that’d typically go to the call center. Ironically, only 13% of all resources at airlines are dedicated from customer service departments typically.
While the number of airlines on Twitter has reaching the 200 mark, at 189, 27 of all airlines still make up 80% of the tweets
While Delta still remains the airline receiving and sending most tweets, it only replied to 17% of the tweets it received, up from compared to 11% last month
Porter Airlines of Canada has the highest global satisfaction score of 111.8 this month, and till date, unseating Air New Zealand, which scored 107.6 last month
AirAsia this month not only became the first airline outside of the US to have a million Facebook fans, it also remains at #2 in terms of mentions on Twitter, followed by TAM Brazil.

More …

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 …

Airlines, as we all know, seem to have taken to social media like a fish takes to water. Well, almost. Over the last three months we’ve shared with you 40 case-studies that have revealed how airlines have used the predominant platforms of social engagement via our Top 10 Facebook, Twitter and Location-Based-Service Initiatives and Crowdsourcing case-packs.

It is now fitting that we take a look at how airports are managing their social engagement models. Our latest Top 10 presentation brings to you 10 11 case-studies that showcase the best airports from around the world in terms of how well they’re evolving and adapting to newer technologies of driving customer engagement.
The Invisible Wall
No, this is in no way related to Harry Potter and Platform 9 and 3-quarters. What I refer to here is the seamless airport experience that leads most passengers to view the airport and airline as the same entity. Most airports would now like their passengers to be able to identify the invisible wall that delineates the airport experience from that of the airline.

This is important primarily because of two reasons:

Individuality: Most passengers probably …

Continuing our coverage and analysis of the dynamic social media landscape for airlines, we’ve released the April 2011 Airlines on Twitter report with Eezeer. Data around airlines on Twitter this month reveals a few stark facts:

99.8% of all tweets are about service item issues – like flight delays, baggage inquiries and other customer service issues that’d typically go to the call center
While the number of airlines on Twitter has increased 10% to 184, 27 of all airlines make up 80% of the tweets (this number stood at 30 last month)
While Delta still remains the airline receiving and sending most tweets, it only replied to 11% of the tweets it received, as compared to 18.2% last month
While there’s a 250% increase in tweets about Timeliness, it is also the worst rated item in terms of satisfaction, with a score of -81.6
Air New Zealand has the highest global satisfaction score of 107.6 this month, unseating Cathay Pacific, which scored 107.7 last month

More interesting data and facts in the infographic below. Enjoy!
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This guest article is by Pauline Hoogervorst, Director, Customer Service Solutions, AirGate Solutions. Pauline’s focus during her career has been Customer Management, experienced from both Operational and Commercial sides of the aviation industry. This also gave her the opportunity to understand the gap between the “Marketing Promise” and the “Customer Experience”. Her motivation and drive is to support the aviation industry to change their organizations to become customer-centric with a service delivery that fits their brand promise.

In today’s environment of instant information, passengers expect to be constantly informed by connecting to a variety of sources whilst maintaining contact with their social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook. With the economic crisis and the rise of the “Social Customer”, leaders of airlines and airports have started to realize that providing Excellent Customer Service is a key differentiator to their competitors.

London’s Gatwick Airport (@Gatwick_Airport) is certainly a leader in this respective, having a Twitter FIDS screen in full public view, allowing ‘social customers’ to tweet any issues that need attention. Being in full public view, everyone can see the airport’s responses and their timeliness.

Because the needs and expectations from passengers change and evolve, the target for …

As airlines continue to grow into the social media age, there seems to be a common, clumsy mistake that will likely become a major point of contention in this space:  a call to action without a communicated incentive.

Halfway through my flight from Washington (IAD) to Seattle last week, I received a special surprise along with my ginger ale…a napkin that doubled as the most useless piece of marketing communication I’d ever received:

Umm…well, I don’t really need any more friends, thanks.

It must have been my lucky day, because after I spilled my drink and grabbed my napkin to clean up, I found the second most useless piece of marketing communication I’d ever received on the back!

Why? Are you going to help me play the stock market?
Innocent though it may be, this United napkin is a classic example of communication without a point. Without making any effort to communicate a single benefit the passenger will receive in exchange for following the call to action, it goes beyond my reason why any passenger would rush to turn on their smart phones upon landing …

We’ve all seen how @DeltaAssist is helping travelers out on Twitter, and now on Facebook too. Then we learnt that 93.8% of all tweets to airlines in March 2011 were about customer service issues [see infographic]. Seeing these trends, it was only a matter of time before we saw more customer service functions go social. And the latest airline to make this move is AirAsia.
Airline Customer Service on Facebook and Twitter
AirAsia, which is already the airline that replies to the highest percentage of tweets in the world (>40%), has created an AskAirAsia account on Twitter, and also a “tab” on Facebook. They’ve taken a dig at travelers’ frustrations with the call-center and asked them to direct questions to the CEO, Tony Fernandes (though the photo looks a few years old!). Quite a neat way to connect with the customers – or “guest” as they call them on AirAsia.

On Twitter, you can simply tweet a question and expect a quick reply during Malaysia working hours. What will be interesting to note is that the AskAirAsia twitter account doesn’t reply to any issues …

The Backstory
These are very exciting times in the airline industry. Last month, I shared a number of vital statistics about airlines’ twitter usage at a keynote in San Francisco [view presentation]. While those gave a good overview of how the industry is using the platform, one key aspect was lacking – the social media landscape for is constantly evolving, and a report produced once doesn’t do it justice. While we felt we should produce an ongoing report on that, we didn’t really have a data source for all the latest and greatest statistics.

That’s when Arnaud from Eezeer got in touch [remember? Eezeer = real-time airline reviews], and mentioned that they’re looking to produce a monthly twitter report from all the data they’ve been gathering from travelers. One thing led to another, and the end result was this first infographic that you see below – full of startling data about how airlines (and travelers) use Twitter. The best part is that this report will be released monthly – so look out for this every month in our infographics section (latest by the 5th of each month).
Airlines on Twitter – Oh…the stories data tells
While you drool …