Social Media in the Airline Industry by Gilbert Ross Presented at Merlien Institute's Qualitative Consumer Research & Insights, 7 & 8 April 2011, Malta http://www.merlien.org

1. Social Media in the Airline Industry
Using Social Media for improving brand experience through better customer insights
Gilbert Ross
Air Malta

2. 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

3. Current and future trends: the shift in balance
•Global traffic growth
•Costs
•Industry regulations
•Gov Tax & charges
•Price-sensitivity
•Competition •Fares & yields
•Profitability
•Marketing budgets
•Market Shares

4. Some strategic responses to the industry’s challenges
Homogenous Web as a sales
Fleet distribution
channel
Check-in
Kiosks & Route
apps Navigation
Optimization
Increase Fuel Price
Ancillary Hedging
Revenue

5. …while all this was happening Social Media came along

6. Adoption of Social Media by the airline industry
Most airlines
introduced social
media at the
average adoption
time
Late majority & Laggard: Many airlines have
had problems with adopting social media
Very few airlines were because of limited resources in staffing,
innovators or early ownership problems, silos & lack of a clear
adopters of the media strategy

7. Social Media Strategies & Goals
Conversation
Direct Research &
Sales Co-Creation
Marketing Analysis
•Engaging •Creating Buzz •Funneling •Crowdsourcing •Brand
customer with •Building Brand traffic to •Ideation Monitoring
brand Equity Booking engine •Competition •Customer
•listening •Promotional •Selling special for best idea insight
•CRM fares & Offers fares on Social •Recruiting for
•Reputation streams surveys
Management •Ancillary •Polling Online
products/Cross- communities
selling

8. Airlines are increasingly realizing that…
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

9. The legendary Kevin Smith Case

10. 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.

11. Malaysia Airlines MH Buddy Facebook App

12. Lufthansa MySkyStatus

18. 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

19. Metrotwin - A British
Airways community in
which members can
review, share and ‘twin’
landmarks and places
between London and
New York

23. Jet blue has a Twitter account
for communication and
customer help
And another one for time-limited
offers called ‘Cheeps’ to their
followers

24. United Airlines uses
Twitter to sell special
fares called ‘Twares’

25. Southwest’s Popular Blog ‘Nuts about Southwest’ engages customers
with airline news updates, podcasts, video blogs & Polls

26. Everyflight.com – Polling and crowd intelligence at its best

29. Social Media for Qualitative research and customer insights:
The Final Frontier
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

30. Various Social media research tools are being used already

31. How can airlines use Social Media for Qual. Research?
Can use as a channel for more traditional
market research methods
Recruiting for surveys, focus groups and research panels
Polling online communities
Online Interviewing
Asking for suggestions
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

32. Listening to influential loyal customers and gathering hot & relevant
conversation topics across social platforms
“@cloudnine: I’m
always disappointed
with the breakfast
served on the London-
NYC flight”
Frequent Flyer Database
Passenger history
Online community

33. Finding co-emergent topics and interests through semantic text mining and
content analysis
Co-emergent Topics & interests
Customer B – Filtered
Customer A – Filtered by Frequency of travel,
by Frequency of travel, reputation,
reputation, involvement, reach,
involvement, reach, topic leadership
topic leadership
Monitoring social conversation
across social cloud – Content
analysis and text mining

34. And the winner is… KLM surprise!

35. D i s c u s s i o n Po i nt s
• 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?

36. Presented at the International conference on
Qualitative Consumer Research & Insights
7 & 8 April 2011, Malta
For more information
Please visit: http://www.merlien.org