A few progressive airlines are quietly using Social Media to re-invent client-facing parts of their businesses. Their success makes them great examples for the rest of the travel industry and big brands at large. A study of social media outreach in the airline industry reveals three major transformative opportunities:
Monitoring Feedback and Issue Resolution
Twitter is proving to be a very efficient way to monitor feedback in real time and resolve customer issues quickly. JetBlue, who is often cited as an example of smart corporate use of Twitter does a terrific job at it. Started as an experiment in the spring of 2007 by Manager of Corporate Communications, Morgan Johnston, their Twitter feed @JetBlue has now over a 1.6 million followers. During its 10th anniversary summit, @JetBlue even created a dedicated hash tag, #jblc10, to push people to voice their feedback.
Southwest learned the need to monitor social conversations in real time the hard way. In February 2010, an incident involving movie director Kevin Smith and the Airline almost turned into a PR debacle for the brand. Thankfully, Southwest, an early adopter of social media (July 2007) was ready to respond quickly and personally to the incident, using twitter to make public amends. Today @southwestair has over a million followers.
Obviously, waiting for an unhappy customer to ‘call’ customer service makes it unacceptably late in the new real time world.
Increasing Branding and Brand Loyalty
Engaging customers using Social Media networks are a great way for airlines to build brand experiences outside of the actual flight. One brand that does an outstanding job of building brand loyalty via personalized conversations on Facebook and Twitter is Virgin America. @virginamerica has almost 80,000 followers on Twitter and about 60,000 fans on Facebook. This week, Virgin America’s Facebook page featured the story of a couple who first met on a Virgin America flight and got engaged this week at the airport in front of the baggage carousel. These types of posts are usually interspersed news and announcements effectively humanizing the entire communications stream. Virgin America has earned a lot of good press for extending their customer-focused, tech-savvy and fun branding on to the web using social media. Twitter even selected them as one of the first brands to roll out their paid ‘sponsored tweets’ program.
Direct Marketing
It should surprise no-one that airlines are capitalizing on customer engagement goodwill to sell tickets. JetBlue has a separate twitter feed, @jetbluecheeps, to post deals (typically on Mondays) giving “the already spontaneous audience of Twitter users a chance to grab great last-minute fares”. @jetbluecheeps has over 78,000 followers. Virgin America and SouthWest broadcasts deals on their main feeds, effectively merging sales with customer stories, service and corporate communications. Occasionally these airlines run contests to stimulate growth and engagement, say 50% off the ticket for the next 50 Twitter followers. As with other channels on the web, actual ROI in dollars can be measured by embedding web analytics tags into outbound message links.
It will be interesting to see how the recent Passenger Bills of Rights affects airlines’ use of social media. David Martin, CEO of the social networking site Kontain.com probably articulated it best as quoted in a CNN article “You can’t just write in a complaint or call customer service anymore… social media, it’s the only weapon,” he said. “Airlines need to be more terrified of that than the actual bill, because they’re going to have to compensate passengers anyway each time they get held up on the tarmac, but they’re also going to lose passengers because their brand will be destroyed every time a passenger uses social media.”