Blog 
From our recent survey and analysis with many airports using social media to date, we are able to categorize the organizational adoption of social media in airports- in terms of how it is being adopted, which departments and for what purposes.
Some background into the situation is warranted as many airports have not begun the journey into using social media-we can suggest that they will fall into one of the following categories:
- Skeptical -nothing tried because not convinced of benefits to any stakeholders.
- Experimenting – brought in tools to begin to understand their use to a segment of use.
- Practicing- have made some investment in tools and personnel and see the benefits so far.
- Thriving- have made social media part of the fabric in terms of culture, objectives and are seeing impacts.
In previous posts, we suggested that the adoption of social media and it’s related technolgies be supporting various airport objectives. We can now take a look at what organizational changes may be required in terms of people, skills and methods.
We should consider the governance of social media as a communications issue and ensure that we don’t let tools enter under the radar in a bottom up fashion. Tools should enter across multiple departments at the same time to make sure we have some direction so that our programs do not become fragmented.
For example, many airports are using tools like twitter to “listen” and we are seeing increased particpation from many potential users groups. Have we considered all perspectives of all stakeholders? Can we assist with the interaction of members in meaningful ways? Are we developing qualitative messaging strategies?
If we have this clearly organized, we can begin to measure the depth of engagement and it’s inherent velocity. There are several ways to measure influence (covered in part 2) and now also introducing the emotional triggers in messaging that has the most value to airports; recognizing sentiment.
Tracking the influence of conversations is what we are talking about. Passenger and employee opinions about the airport and it’s vast number of constituents really count in exponential ways. What are they qualitatively saying about their experiences, values, purchases and services?
This creates an opportunity like no other to find strategic meaning in social media. The thing is, it takes a live person to truly understand another person-and as we well know, even then it can be hard to understand meaning when shrouded in emotion. There are several challenges about mining the social web for meaning including sentiment “polarity”-neutrality, postitive, negative -”intensity” who is talking and what is their emotional state and other factors.
Tracking public sentiment over time does provide the insights we need to manage change, growth and value in airports. The challenge and the opportunity is there. We have several strategies and methods to present in the next few posts to take the guesswork out of this analysis.
What we’re developing is a set of tools and dashboards that will enable airports to monitor and measure social media activities against their KPI’s or objectives.