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"?