We all know what happened when the volcano in Iceland erupted and resulted in utter chaos in the aviation world. We also saw how some airlines and aviation authorities around the world struggled to cope with servicing the customers, while others used the latest social media tools to engage and update them.

At SimpliFlying, we saw a paradigm shift in the way airlines handle crises management, in the age of social media. Instead of writing an article on it, we put together an info-graphic, that details the five key steps for managing crises, in the wake of the volcanic eruption. Both a PDF version, and a PPT version are available for download and printing. An Apple Keynote version will be available soon.

Please feel free to share it with your colleagues, print it out or use it in your presentations, as long as full credit is given to SimpliFlying.

Special thanks to Steve Frischling for help with the content, and Arno Ghelfi for the design.
Infographic – Five steps to successful crisis managment for airlines, in the age of social media [PDF]
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Note: This article and slideshow, created by me, was first published on Mashable.com.

Hundreds of thousands of travelers scrambled to find alternative modes of transportation, last minute hotel bookings and even home-stays when the Icelandic volcano disrupted air travel around Europe over the last seven days. The official figure for airlines’ losses stands at $1.7 billion in just six days, with U.K.-based airlines British Airways and Virgin Atlantic likely to suffer the most.

Though it sounds like all doom and gloom, the silver lining of this crisis is that a lot of travelers looked to social media for help, and airlines and other authorities actually rose to the challenge. Here are some examples of winning information and customer service strategies that were implemented via social media.
Deep dive into social media for airlines
As I highlighted in-depth in my previous article, EuroControl was very impressive as they rushed to update passengers about the latest information about flights through a variety of online and offline mediums.

In just seven days, there were over 55,000 mentions of #ashtag, and the usage was so …