Social Media in the Airline Industry

An airline company that knows how to use social media well is JetBlue. This is a company that started out on Twitter in 2007.  They now have over a million followers. 

JetBlue began a Twitter account simply to provide more timely customer service.  They experimented with tone and content, discovering that a chatty tone and attention to customer service issues resulted in more tweets, whereas broadcasting press releases and announcements resulted in silence. JetBlue learned to be responsive to their customers’ needs and ask when they wanted feedback or input. Customers were very positive about being asked. 

More recently, JetBlue has divided up its Twitter accounts into two streams: the regular JetBlue account for conversations and the other account, JetBlueCheeps , for deals.

What they did right:

·         Used the right social media tool for the job.  They wanted real time interaction to improve customer service.  Twitter was an excellent choice for responding to customers quickly in a friendly, casual tone.

·         Experimented. Assessed. Improved. JetBlue tried different types of tone and content on Twitter when they first started. They assessed the responses to each type of communication style, and discovered that one was more effective to engage their customers than the other. Conversational tone for responding to customer service issues was better than broadcasting info.

·         Engaged. Responded. They asked questions of their customers. “What would you like to see?” Customers loved being asked to provide feedback.

·         Responded quickly.  In case studies of other airlines (Vietnam Airlines, American Airlines, Qantas) the issue of timeliness of Twitter responses from airlines came up repeatedly.  Airlines often seem to frustrate customers by having Twitter accounts, but not responding to tweets.  Recently, it seems that Qantas has improved Twitter responsiveness during and after the volcanic ash cloudlast year, but overall, airlines seem to be poor at responding to customers via social media.

JetBlue continues to use Twitter well

In March 2010, JetBlue launched a Twitter Ticket Giveaway in celebration of its 10^th anniversary. The company tweeted secret locations in several cities where people could receive free plane tickets. The campaign was highly successful in terms of adding 4000 Twitter followers in one day and receiving lots of positive media attention. JetBlue used multiple channels for this campaign, with blogs,  and video along with Twitter.

 JetBlue’s understanding and engagement with their audience have made them highly successful in using social media.  Other airlines should be taking notes.

For an interesting spin on airline social media campaigns (with a questionable stalker-ish side) is KLM’s Surprise gift campaign. 

Personally,  I think I’d rather have the airline paying for larger numbers of intelligent, empowered communications officers manning the Twitter accounts for crises and problems than a team of people investigating my online profile and preferences and freaking me out with a gift that shows they've been "Big Brothering" me.

How do you think  social media could be used to solve some of the problems in airline travel?

Tribes

I recently watched Seth Godin's  inspirational talk on how we should say what we need to say to our “tribe.”  Our tribe consists of a group of  people who have something in common with us and with whom we can share and affect change. As our social circles have become larger and larger, we find ourselves returning to a  level that must be instinctive to humans—the tribe.

A tribe is “a unit of sociopolitical organization consisting of a number of families, clans, or other groups who share a common ancestry and culture and among whom leadership is typically neither formalized nor permanent.”  We are not comfortable with huge social groups: a smaller group of like-minded people with a “common culture” and an informal leadership is what we turn to when the world is there spread out before us as our community.

This concept of smaller social groupings has shown up in Google’s new social media platform, Google+.  The “Circles” feature allows you to divide your contacts into groups that you connect with as smaller groups (e.g., a “friends circle,” a “family circle” and so on).  Again, it’s the smaller tribe we want, not the overwhelming sea of voices in the crowd.

As an educator, I became enamoured of a new approach to the classroom, called Tribes Learning Community. I saw this approach being used in a third grade classroom and it was truly an inspiration! There was much sharing and growing and learning of values, ethics, morals and healthy social skills like active listening and conflict resolution.  A common culture had been developed in this class so that children in the Tribes classroom were connecting and sharing in ways kids usually do not. 

It seems to me that humans need tribes even in this age when we can communicate across the planet in seconds. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

 Do we crave tribes?  Does it give us a sense of group belonging that we cannot find when we have the world opened up to us to "friend"?

Art Influences Culture or Culture Influences Art?

Culture Influences Art 

My friend and I had a long discussion about art and culture. We concluded that culture definietly influences art:  look at  pop art. Pop art is really only meaningful within the context of a commercialist culture. It reacts to commercialism and the repetitive, flashy marketing messages bombarding us in our culture.Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroes and Campbells soup can wouldn’t mean anything to a tribesman from Indonesia because he doesn’t know the cultural context that gives meaning to this art.

There are works of art that transcend culture, that stand outside of time and culture to speak to us on a basic human level.  The Mona Lisa.  A tribesman from Indonesia would be just as intrigued by her smile as a Renaissance man.  Mozart. Bach. Beethoven. Vivaldi. You can’t help but be fascinated no matter where or when you are from.

My friend and I decided that some works of art that transcend culture speak to us on a human level, not a cultural level. So culture influences some art and some art stands outside its culture.

Art Influences Culture

Is one of the roles of art within a culture to reflect back to us what we look like as a society and to show that maybe who we are could use some change?   

An artist’s main intent, we felt, is not so much to effect societal change, but to express an idea or concept or feeling. That idea, concept or feeling could be generated by the culture or by the state of being human.  These comments are important to a society. They are warnings: Hey, society, look at what you are doing as a collective. Is this truly the way you want to go? 

The effect of art seems not to directly cause major change within a society. That would be your Che’s. Instead, artists can reach people on an emotional level, fire up sentiment which then influences people to act.

First Up Against the Wall When the Revolution Comes
The rebels and the intellectuals and the artists.  Artists see societal change for what it is, they can predict outcomes, and they have “voices” to communicate what they see through the power of symbols, stories, and emotional connections. They are influential in that they help emotionally support societal movements and change.  They provide connections, cohesion, symbols, impetus, and emotional rationale for change.

What Should We Be Paying Attention to Now?

What are our artists saying today? What are the trends?

Time Manage Your Life

After reading Kai Nagata’s blog on why he quit his CTV reporting job, I got to thinking about people who make radical changes in the direction their life is going. For those of us older than Kai, it’s called mid-life crisis and I think it’s a healthy phase to go through.  It’s a time of re-evaluating where we are going and where we’d like to go. 

One thing Kai wrote that struck me, especially coming from a 24-year old, was “…on the long list of things I could be doing, television news is not the best use of my short life.”  Hmmm. It’s true. Our lives are short.  We should reflect on how we are spending our time on earth. We learn to manage our time at work.  Why not take it to a larger scale and learn to manage our time on earth?

Like many others, I participated in a time management training session at work. We were taught to identify our high priorities on the job and focus our energies there (see Quadrants 1, 2 in the table below). Smaller, distracting tasks (Quadrant 3) should just fill in the time around those larger priorities.  Activities in Quadrant 4 are the time-wasters and should be avoided altogether.

Why not apply those same principles to our lives? If we did, what would we be doing?  What to us are the most important activities in life? What are the things we would regret not doing when we die?  “I wish I had had the courage to live a life true to myself” is a common regret of people on their deathbeds.  If we can learn to identify what are our Quadrant 1’s in life and make sure we work on those things, our lives will be filled with activities that lead us towards fulfillment, not regret.

Our time management instructor used the illustration of the large rocks and small rocks in a jar to explain how you to change your priorities in order to spend time on what’s important. The jar is your time.  Important activities (Quadrant 1’s and 2’s) are big rocks. If you fill up your jar with sand and small rocks first (the unimportant activities), and wait to put in the big rocks into the jar later, you won’t be able to fit the big rocks into the jar. What’s important for you to accomplish won’t happen.

But, if you fill up your jar with big rocks first and then let the little rocks and the sand (unimportant activities) fill in the time around those big, important rocks, you will be able to accomplish the things that are really important because they will come first.  You will also get all the little things done because they will fill in around the big items.

If we apply that same concept to our lives, we should be filling our time on earth and focusing on those things that are important for us to achieve in life.  And we should let the smaller, distracting activities fill in around those priorities.

I had to think this through for myself. What are the most important things I want to accomplish in life? 

I came up with these for my own Quadrant 1’s: 

•   Take care of my loved ones
•  Live in a happy, loving, sharing relationship
•  Learn as much as I can
• Travel as much as I can 
•   Help others see their potential and run with it
•  Share knowledge, joy

It’s not really a bucket list, although that’s a great exercise as well.  It’s about prioritizing time. We only go around once: we should manage that time well and work on what’s truly significant to us. 

 

So…what are your big rocks?  What would you like to spend your time on earth doing? 

Gardening made E.Z.

If you are a non-gardener  (like me) and you’d like to give growing veggies a try, here’s what I’d suggest for easing into it.

Start with container gardening.  It’s easy, rewarding, and doesn’t involve knowing anything except that plants need water and sun.

•  Buy a bunch of pots (if you are on a budget, get them at yard sales).
• Buy some bags of potting soil.
•  Buy some little baby herbs like basil, rosemary, mint, chives (for Eastern Canada/U.S.) 
• Put the soil in the pots (it will make a mess) and then pop one baby herb plant into a hole you make in the soil of each pot.
•  Water.
•   Put in a sunny spot.  Watch that they don’t get too much sun (they will look wilty and unhealthy). Make sure you water them every other day or so.

Once you get the swing of that, you can also try planting seeds that say “patio garden” or “container garden” on them.  I’ve had success growing lettuce, carrots, green onion, Swiss chard, and chives from seed in pots.

You need to plant them in the spring after risk of frost at night is over (last weekend in May or so).

This is the point I’m at in my gardening.  Next year, I plan to get really serious with a raised bed garden and lots more lettuce, spinach, some zucchini, garlic and Swiss chard.

Benefits of even minimal gardening:

• Pride: You will find yourself pointing out to those at your table that the normal-looking salad was made from your own lettuce and baby Swiss chard (your tone will convey an expectation of praise and acclaim).

• Taste:  Lots more herbs!! You can add fresh herbs to dishes with wild abandon now.  I used to carefully ration my store-bought fresh basil.  Now I chop up handfuls because there’s lots and more coming. 

• Satisfaction: Feel connected to the land. It will make you feel wholesome to say in a casual way to your sous-chef (aka child), “Would you go out and pick me a little rosemary for the roasted potatoes?”

Anybody else with a new green thumb have ideas for container gardening or how to start out as a newbie gardener?

Speculations on the Future of the English Language

Linguistic speculations from my past

As a former linguistics student, language use and language variations fascinate me.  I remember arguing passionately with my best friend’s boyfriend in grad school about whether or not it was appropriate to teach Black English Vernacular (BEV) to second language learners who would be living and working in an area where the predominant variation of English was BEV.

His argument was that second language learners should always be taught standard academic English and afterwards they can try to learn non-standard variants.  My argument was that teaching someone standard English that makes them communicate inappropriately in their target language community (“Delighted to meet you” in da hood) won’t help them fit in or communicate well if they are immersed in an environment that uses a “non-standard” English variation.  

My position these days would be less the zealous linguistics student and more the moderate, experienced teacher. No more frothing at the mouth for teaching BEV.

Linguistic speculations today

Instead, my latest passion is for online variations of English.  There are all sorts of new and flexible ways to use spelling, punctuation, abbreviations, grammar, vocabulary, morphemes…. It’s a great new language playground out there!!   

I think online English brings out the rebel in me: I love seeing how everyone is breaking all the rules and getting away with it. w00t! e e cummings, it's ur new day! Rejoice in texting acronyms! (LOL—once I mashed the keyboard with my fist and sent the letter blob to a colleague who uses lots of texting acronyms—took him half an hour of searching to realize I’d just sent him random letters.) Gotta  love tweets (RT@someoneyouknow), throw in the pronouns  “i” and “u,” add a few “z” to wordz, publish “thru” defiantly in ur blog, and isn’t it gr8 2 use #s, 2? Even the emoticons bring me glee.

Purist writer colleagues shudder.  They point to the degradation of the language and bemoan the fate of the English language: everyone is writing like first graders or worse and getting away with it!  It is all so sick and wrong.

My theory on the future of the English language

Here’s what I say to calm them down.  I tell them that I think  we could potentially end up with two written variations of English:

1.  High English (formal, academic English with set rules and  guidelines for professional and international text) 
2. Low English (informal, “improper” but commonly accepted English with evolving and flexible rules for everyday communication)

The fact that my purist friends know the High English well would benefit them. They’d be in demand as fewer and fewer people would be able to write in High English, but it would be necessary for professional, international documents.

The Low English would not be accepted internationally nor yet standardized due the constant changes in its use.  It would only be used for casual, online communication where you don’t have to worry about conventions or rules—you just need to get your message across.

What do you think?

I’m open to other theories along these lines.  What do you think is going to happen to written English?  Will we ever see teachers accepting essays about “wat i did 4 summr vctn”?

Social Media in the Medical Industry

Careful and conservative attitude

Those in the medical field tend to be conservative and careful about social media. This is understandable.  By writing something that is stored in cyberspace forever, health care providers and medical organizations open themselves up to potential lawsuits now or 20 years from now.

While social media is being adopted by some organizations in the medical industry (e.g., the Mayo Clinic) very effectively, in general, it seems that health care is slow to jump on the social media bandwagon.  Health care providers are concerned about opening themselves up to negativity and lawsuits (easy for this to happen in that field) and don’t see the need yet to invest time and resources in developing social media strategies.  

Little “need” to engage

The medical industry is different from other industries where attracting clients or customers is important.  There are always sick people, always the need for more qualified doctors and nurses.  Consequently, medical organizations don’t see the need to engage with their audience through social media. There isn't really a strong motivation for this.  Yet. No-risk, one-way dissemination of information suffices at the moment.

Potential for social media in the medical industry

However, there is great potential for those in the medical industry to use social media to collect feedback from patients, warn people of epidemics, provide information on what to do during flu season, collaborate with colleagues, use video blogging to explain what to do in a medical emergency, receive thanks, get suggestions for improvement, and so on.  It’s just slow to happen. 

Other priorities

There are so many other complex issues to deal with in the medical field and no lack of patients that social media engagement has had to take backstage to more pressing issues.  Perhaps social media could be used towards solving problems such as wait times, numbers of qualified doctors, medical errors, and research and development.  

Any ideas? I would love to hear how social media could be used by the medical industry to solve problems.  

Rediscovering Cooking

I moved to Canada, got a job, bought a house, and decided to rediscover cooking. On a shopping trip for housewares, I perused the cookbook section of the store and found a likely guide to my new interest. It was an attractive cookbook with coloured pictures (necessary for inspiration and comparison to what I actually produce).  The lists of ingredients was short and readable. It was cheap. I bought it.
 

First I tried the Thai pumpkin curry. That was excellent. Not too difficult. Got rave reviews. Then I tried a Banana Rum dessert. Yummy!  Next was the Chicken Pesto and Mozzarella Panini.  Kids were in heaven. I became a hero when I discovered the Fruit Cobbler. From there it went on: Cuban Beef Picadillo, Spinach, Pear and Walnut salad.  Suddenly, I could accept invitations to book clubs without fear of the obligatory dish to pass.  I could show up at someone’s dinner party with a real, homemade dessert.  Things were humming.

I got a part-time seasonal job at Chapters.  Ooooh, now I could replace my tatty old Better Homes and Gardens cookbook from university with the deluxe gift edition in hardcover.  I added Beef Stroganoff, Fajitas, Ham and Swiss Quiche, Giant Ginger Cookies, and Coconut Macaroons (the egg white kind) to my repertoire.  I no longer feared dinner parties. I could chat with the foodies at lunch.

Last weekend, my parents celebrated their 50^th anniversary which involved me hosting a dinner party for 10 people and 2 dogs on Friday night (Thai Chicken Curry with Pumpkin) and a dinner party for 17 people and 5 dogs on Saturday night (shish kabobs, rice pilaf, Greek salad). I have a very small house. In the past, this kind of event would have turned me into an anti-cooking werewolf of fearsome nastiness. However, this year, we had a delicious meal, everyone was delighted with the menu, they were fed to the gills, all was peace and harmony, and I no longer fear hosting family celebrations.

There’s so much good in re-discovering the simple joy of preparing and eating food.  If you haven’t yet discovered how great it feels to make a dish that looks delicious and tastes like you went to a schmancy restaurant, I suggest getting your hands on the book that started it all for me: the Weeknight Cookbook from Williams-Sonoma.  

Look at the pictures. Choose one that has ingredients that you think you can handle. See what happens.  There’s a nice sense of accomplishment in knowing you can arrive at a dinner party with a main dish or a salad or a dessert or an appetizer that you actually did not purchase.  You no longer have to sign up to bring the plastic forks for potlucks. And it’s great when you can entertain 17 people and 5 dogs for a family celebration and come out smiling.

Twittequette, Blogstyle, n WackComments

I notice that there are certain types of “etiquette” in online communities and certain stylistic elements of this genre of writing that can be intimidating at first.

Twittequette

• I heard in a recent workshop that if someone follows you on Twitter, it’s a good idea to follow back. Ohhhhhh!
•  Polite ways to end a conversation on Twitter?  I just stop replying.  That seems to be common practice, but it still seems like there should be an easing-off or a closing. ( Something like "@suzemuse  Well, I better go do my laundry now. Thanks for the updates on new video blogging tools. Over and out.")

Blogstyle:

•  Twitter content seems to be better if it's about interesting things you’ve seen, done or learned.
• Blogging seems to be better if it's about what you can share to help other people interested in that same topic understand it better (instructional sharing slant seems to work well).   
• According to those-who-know the top blog writing tips mention that having opinions and lots of  links are good.

WackComments

•  (OK, I stole the heading from SisterSalad—but keep reading). Posting comments even requires understanding stylistic conventions.  
• Some comments are “better” than others. I’m still analyzing why. Clever is good. Thoughtful and insightful is good.  Personal is not always good (i.e., who cares?)  Asking more questions seems to be safe.
• SisterSalad did this hilarious youtube vid “Yo Comments Are Wack”  on what NOT to do and how bad grammer ain’t good.

This is a new style, a new genre. It’s kind of like writing in a second language—there are conventions that are at first baffling and take some time to acquire.  And like a second language, it will come eventually.

CBC-TV crew follows Pinecrest students as they take on a Boston Marathon challenge

CBC-TV crew follows Pinecrest students as they take on a Boston Marathon challenge

Ottawa's old growth forest in danger--South March Highlands

There is a rally on Wed., July 22 at All Saints High School, Kanata at 6 p.m. to protect this forest.

Ottawa's Old Growth Forest in the South March Highlands area of Kanata is being destroyed to make way for urban development. The South March Highlands forest is over 10,000 years old, ecologically unique and provides habitat for numerous species of wildlife that are at risk. Many compare it to Algonquin Park in  its beauty and bio‐diversity.

This area is also sacred to First Nations People. Grandfather William Commanda, Algonquin Spiritual Elder, has stated that "...this is a living temple, a place of Manitou, a special place of nature, and that precious reality also demands immediate protection and reverence."


Citizens have been trying to protect this area since 1981.  It is now 1/3 the size it was in 1970 when it was protected as a National Environmental Area.  Each time, the loss of protected forest has been due to urban development.

If you would like to help, please visit:
http://southmarch.wordpress.com/how-to-help/
or join the rally tonight at 6 pm in Kanata.