Social Media in the Airl ine Industry

Using Social Media for improving brand experience through better customer insights

G i l b e r t R o s s

Air Malta

Growing challenges in a fast changing world

� Increase in crude oil prices mainly driven by wars & conflicts in oil

producing regions

� Global economic downturn: Collapsing of western & Asian

Economies

� Pandemic outbreaks: SARS (2003), Foot and mouth (China 2005, UK

2007), H1N1, H5N1 Bird Flu

� Weather Disruptions: recent snow storms across Europe last

December

� Natural disasters: Iceland’s volcanic ash cloud in 2010

� Terrorist threats: The world in super vigilant mode since 9/11

� Increased Regulations: Emission trading Scheme in 2012

� Political conflict: Current uprising in Libya

� Increased Competition: New entrants – Strong mergers – increased

presence of low-cost startups

•Global traffic growth

•Costs

•Industry regulations

•Gov Tax & charges

•Price-sensitivity

•Competition•Fares & yields

•Profitability

•Marketing budgets

•Market Shares

Current and future trends: the shift in balance

Homogenous

FleetWeb as a sales

distribution

channel

Check-in

Kiosks &

apps

Route

Navigation

Optimization

Increase

Ancillary

Revenue

Fuel Price

Hedging

Some strategic responses to the industry’s challenges

…while all this was happening Social Media came along

Adoption of Social Media by the airline industry

Most airlines

introduced social

media at the

average adoption

time

Very few airlines were

innovators or early

adopters of the media

Late majority & Laggard: Many airlines have

had problems with adopting social media

because of limited resources in staffing,

ownership problems, silos & lack of a clear

strategy

ConversationDirect

MarketingSales Co-Creation

Research &

Analysis

•Engaging

customer with

brand

•listening

•CRM

•Reputation

Management

•Creating Buzz

•Building Brand

Equity

•Promotional

fares & Offers

•Funneling

traffic to

Booking engine

•Selling special

fares on Social

streams

•Ancillary

products/Cross-

selling

•Crowdsourcing

•Ideation

•Competition

for best idea

•Brand

Monitoring

•Customer

insight

•Recruiting for

surveys

•Polling Online

communities

Social Media Strategies & Goals

Shift in Power: From 1 to many

broadcasting to a 1 to 1 or many to

many interactivity

Listening & Conversing not

disseminating information

Need to give to get back: Creating valuable

information that is likeable & shareable, building

online communities & responding in real time

Understanding how Social networks behave:

Some highly connected individuals can be Brand

ambassadors or your worst nightmare

Airlines are increasingly realizing that…

The legendary Kevin Smith Case

Social Media as a CRM tool

� Monitoring conversation: listening to what people are saying

about your brand

� Respond in near real-time: being preemptive and trying to

solve an incident or problem before it turns into a catastrophe

� Keeping customers in the loop: inform passengers with status

changes, delay information, weather updates, etc

� Leverage on customer social chatter: Pickup bits of information

from customers – example stranded customers in a snow storm

often use Twitter #tags to help each other out. Some airlines

pick this up and repost it in their own social streams.

Malaysia Airlines MH Buddy Facebook App

Lufthansa MySkyStatus

Leveraging the power of the community

� The paradigm shift from command and control to customer

empowerment & engagement

� Nurturing the crowd through community building – opening

up to user generated content (UCG) and customer to

customer (C2C) communication

� Communities are the ideal environment to create value,

increase retention and loyalty, be more transparent and

outsource content generation

Metrotwin - A British

Airways community in

which members can

review, share and ‘twin’

landmarks and places

between London and

New York

Jet blue has a Twitter account

for communication and

customer help

And another one for time-limited

offers called ‘Cheeps’ to their

followers

United Airlines uses

Twitter to sell special

fares called ‘Twares’

Southwest’s Popular Blog ‘Nuts about Southwest’ engages customers

with airline news updates, podcasts, video blogs & Polls

Everyflight.com – Polling and crowd intelligence at its best

� Airlines still not very involved in using Social Media for qualitative research and customer

insights

� Most airlines still heavily dependent on their Frequent flyer database for recruiting

customers in surveys ,focus groups and research panels

� Good news – although there is a gap, it is a very narrow one

� Many airlines are already listening to conversations across the social sphere and

monitoring brand mention, sentiment and responding to particular customer problems

� Some airlines also have their online communities where a lot of sharing of ideas and

suggestions go on. Also reviews, polls and customer-brand co-creation

� Airlines are listening but are not looking hard at the information

� The next step is turning the social chatter into actionable insight and structured

intelligence

Social Media for Qualitative research and customer insights:

The Final Frontier

Various Social media research tools are being used already

How can airlines use Social Media for Qual. Research?

� Recruiting for surveys, focus groups and research panels

� Polling online communities

� Online Interviewing

� Asking for suggestions

Can use as a channel for more traditional

market research methods

Using a ‘Netnographical’ approach

Netnography [interNET + ethNOGRAPHY] is a qualitative and

explorative research approach to analyze the consumer dialogue in

online communities in order to gain unbiased insights

� Involves content analysis and text mining of conversations in social

communities

� Unlike structured interviews and Focus groups it is unbiased and

non-intrusive

� Explorative and inductive

“@cloudnine: I’m

always disappointed

with the breakfast

served on the London-

NYC flight”

Frequent Flyer Database

Passenger history

Online community

Listening to influential loyal customers and gathering hot & relevant

conversation topics across social platforms

Co-emergent Topics & interests

Customer A – Filtered

by Frequency of travel,

reputation,

involvement, reach,

topic leadership

Customer B – Filtered

by Frequency of travel,

reputation,

involvement, reach,

topic leadership

Monitoring social conversation

across social cloud – Content

analysis and text mining

Finding co-emergent topics and interests through semantic text mining and

content analysis

And the winner is… KLM surprise!

Discuss ion Points

• How can airlines gather actionable insights

from Social Media to improve customer

loyalty?

• How can airlines use Social Media to better

understand how to enhance customer

service?

Presented at the International conference on

Qualitative Consumer Research & Insights

7 & 8 April 2011, Malta

For more information

Please visit: http://www.merlien.org