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In our previous blog on social media metrics, we briefly touched on organizational issues as it applies to airports. First was, what changes may need to be considered in terms of people, skills, methods of deployment and KPI measurement. We want to ensure that initiatives of value are properly aligned with desired outcomes – if mishandled, they could lead to mismanagement of messaging and perhaps alienate passengers or violate some federal aviation / communications regulations in your particular jurisdiction.
We would suggest that social media be focused on passenger usage primarily. If such, we should ask then “Who should own Social Media in the airport organization?” When we reviewed our Top 10 Airports Using Twitter and Top 10 Airports Using Facebook, we found many major international airports did not have a social media presence. This may demonstrate the dilemma currently facing these airport and their internal organization.
Traditionally, we see the following breakdown of social media usage;
Marketing 54%
Department creep 18% ( other departments who are dabbling unspecified)
Public Relations 14%
Few organizations utilize a centralized group for social media responsibility for the reason that it is a cross functional dicipline. We need to develop a central connection point as we do not want to get the aforementioned “mixed plans and messaging” that is detrimental to our objectives.
What we want to embrace is the single voice of airport authenticity that is passionate about establishing meaningful connections with passengers in a consistent channel. So if we add some tethers representing cross functional communications to the central connection point we end up with what is called a “Hub and Spoke” model.
This model allows airports to develop top down strategic initiatives which consider all stakeholders. We allow executive buy in at all levels, we attribute resources including people, budget and we provide for cross cultural equilibrium across multiple departments.
Developing this model for your airport may seem daunting at first and you may come to realize that there may be many issues in selecting a leader for the social media initiatives. Frankly, the model supports collaboration and to expect one person to act as a top down driver reverts back to a poor model (centralized tower) that is unlikely to provide the potential output we desire.
Creating a dynamic model
Things we suggest you try to build and evolve your model is a social media lab. We can provide you with the workshops and social media sandboxes to start your efforts. This is so you can experiment successfully in a safe place with a back up plan. Develop your hub and spoke teams and find out who can run with what portions.
Develop strategies to support each department’s objectives, then distill down the most impactful portions that all teams can support. We can provide strategic frameworks and tools for experimentation if you need help. We can provide templated tools specifically for airports like our metrics platform for brand monitoring. We are working with Radian6, a well known social media monitoring company, amongst others. 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.
Outsource the tools and don’t rely on IT or capital budgets to fund social media – it’s all about the cloud services and getting to “Go” and certainly should not be an internal IT project.
We will cover more on the departmental social media implementation strategies in the next post.