How can legacy airlines, airports or hotels make an entry into social media? Start from within

In the past few weeks, I’ve interacted with senior executives leading Marketing/Digital Marketing at a number of legacy airlines. Most of these have hardly made baby steps into social media branding. The biggest hurdle they seem to face is not achieving success in their new initiatives, but proving themselves internally.

And that’s only natural, since most monolithic organizations have more naysayers than doers. And the doers seldom have more clout than the naysayers. So, how to overcome this challenge?

Look within – start from the inside

My suggestion to these executives was to look at the upcoming marketing plans/campaigns. Something that’s already been budgeted for, and would be rolled out in the next three months. Then, work with the marketing team to “social media-fy” that plan. Basically, you’d want to add wings to the campaign through social media. And make sure there’s a way to measure the results (even if qualitative) so that you can measure the before-and-after effect of social media on the initiatives.

This allows you to achieve a few things:

  1. You prove that social media adds value
  2. There’s no need for substantial additional budget to run the SM activities
  3. Working from an already-planned initiative is much easier than proposing brand new (=risky) social media campaign
  4. You can then duplicate this for a couple of other marketing initiatives and then branch out social media gradually
  5. You prove your worth, and get started on the road to becoming a social media rockstar

Once you’ve done this, you can easily embark on the 11 steps I’ve suggested earlier, to quick-start the social media branding strategy at your airline, airport or hotel.

Does that help? Legacy airlines, are you listening?

If you have questions about the process, or would like to seek personal help in making this work, feel free to reach out to me by email: shashank[at]simpliflying[dot]com. Meanwhile, I’d love to hear your thoughts on your efforts in social media in the comments or over on Twitter (@simpliflying)

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