Socially Catering Airline Passengers and Brand Loyalty in the World of Social and Mobile Media
Missed Connection, Missed Opportunity to Positively Socially Connect with Airline Brand
Can this really be happening to you?! After you waited 45 minutes on the tarmac, just to be moved to another plane that did not have enough flight crew, which caused a you to have an overnight stay in a in a connecting city that you had no desire to stay in, without luggage, and no cell phone charger. To make matters worse, you now have to wait in line behind the other 80 people that missed their connection, with only two customer service agents that have no authority to do anything other than give you a card to call customer service (that happened to have closed 15 minutes prior to you calling). This makes you have to rearrange your other flight plans for the week, because you now have to re-schedule tomorrow’s $500,000+ client presentation (with one power bar left on my phone) which you will now have to fly to them as opposed to them meeting them at your office. This has probably put you in a very bad place… at least in mind and temperament. Ok, I could be projecting my most recent airline encounter.
Yet, I know I am not alone. With over 2 billion airline flights worldwide each year, it is estimated that 15-25% of flights are delayed, with 2.5% of airline flights canceled (Source AirlineComplaints.org & NY Daily Journal). In travel requiring multiple connections, an additional 2-6% of airline passenger flights are missed do to carrier connection delays in which the first carrier was late on arrival causing the air traveler to miss their connecting flight (U.S. Department of Transportation). Additionally, flights missed outside of the airports ability to control, 7% of consumer missed flights is self inflicted by the consumer not giving themselves enough time to arrive to the airport to handle all the eccentricities’ of travelling in a post 911 world.
For the airlines marketing brand, ironically, and to the airlines dismay, fault, in today’s socially interconnected world of Facebook, YouTube, UStream and the 250+ other social networking communities, is 90% of the time blamed on the airline (Adreka Social Analysis – Airline Industry). In 2010, within the social sphere, over 2.8 million blog entries depicting a strong dislike or bad airline experience has been reported since January of 2009 (Adreka Social Analytics). Given that the average social account averages 130 friends / syndicated connections, the net influence of an airlines brand name is potentially muddied in the eyes of 364 million future customers.
So what can the airlines do in the way of brand strategy to take the sting out of the consumer’s temperament and still maintain the bottom line?
The Reactive Airline Marketing Response
The frontline of an airlines brand defense is to know your customer! Give real time support, anywhere! Most customers just want access to quick information, to questions like where’s my gate, and is my flight on time. If a problem arises, over 90%+ of customers want to vent yell at someone. We want to feel that we are heard and understood. Given empathy and understanding is a majority of the battle. Peer to Peer (P2P) communication via teleconference is the easiest way to deploy massive, centralized, and real-time customer support over the footprint of X major airlines, servicing on average X hubs domestically, Y worldwide.
Create a positive outcome, syndicated brand strategy – Problems will always arise, you’re your organization handles crisis as it occurs will define your brand socially. Whether it be voice, video, or an online chat, record and socialized the consumers end result – they are already going to talk about it on their facebook page, beat them to the punch and turn a consumer question, or resolved issue into a marketing opportunity.
The Proactive Airline Marketing Response
Monitor and engage all social media. There are over 500K new blogs posts daily, with approximately 5% being travel related, allows ample opportunity for an airline to measure, monitor, engage and positively re-enforce brand daily.
Create Tools and Mediums to better foster proactive communication. P2P in customer service kiosks, Iphone / Ipad apps, 24/7 customer service lines, allow the customer to be engaged early, prior to their issue being turned into a negative experience and shared with prospective future customers through socialization.
Provide automated or real person follow up dependent upon the severity of the situation. Reaching out to your customers, post a rectified bad customer experience, adds an additional layer of we care.
Airlines that implement a portion of the strategy points above will have in essence an unfair competitive advantage over those that ignore the socialization of their consumers negative travel experiences. Not to mention, it any of the above airline brand strategy steps would have turned my negative experience into a positive story about an airline that had a unified brand and loyalty program. Because of my negative airline experience, I was able to create a real world case study with a simple solution that I will potentially save the airlines tens of millions of dollars in brand loyalty loss, and provide consumers everywhere with a better travel experience. I believe I just proved capitalism and karma can co-exist!
Happy travels to where ever your final destination may take you – John Cataldi – The Real Mad Man
Twittiquette, most get it, some don’t, this post may not save your life, but potentially your reputation. This is my personal RANT on Twitter Twittiquette, or the lack there of. Personally, first, I like to Tweet. For those less familiar with the medium, Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as Tweets. As a social media tool, Twitter adds additional depth to social suspect of interest, whether that be an individual, group, celebrity, sports team, political candidate, etc.
Recently, I heard Twitter dubbed as the “SMS” of the Internet. Just then it all became clear, SOME Twitterers treat their Tweets as if it was a personal journal of communication between friends, though what most fail to consider is unlike SMS which can selectively send to an individual or select group, Twitter is a broadcast medium. Based upon your user name, subject criteria, and freshness of tweets, you may attract the wrong type of follower.
Thus the Twitter Rant on the Subject of Twittiquette:
Twittiquette Rule #1: THINK SAFETY: Always put your safety first. NEVER give out personal information. June 24th 2009, Man tweeted that he was going on vacation, gave dates of his departure, even syndicated his post to his Face Book page, good post, right?! Well is may have been, but in the end his home got robbed, which was a likely result of Twitter’s ability to reach hundreds of thousands of people, by making his post searchable to everyone, including the thief.
Twittiquette Rule #2: DON’T TWEET ACTIVITIES YOU DON’T WANT TO TELL YOUR MOM: What goes on the Internet, stays on the Internet, especially when you may be syndicating your message to the dozens of search bots that will help add your posts in the form of search queries to leading search engines and social networks. Case in point, when I am looking to hire new talent or research a potential business relationship, I use social media as a research tool. For twitter, doing an advanced twitter search is easy http://search.twitter.com/advanced . A few weeks ago I was interviewing new candidate for a sales position. The young man that posted, “omg it was only 10 thirtay and im already drunk!!”, did not get the job.
Twittiquette Rule #3: I DON’T CARE IF YOUR BOWELS ARE REGULAR: Please be interesting, NOONE Cares that you clogged a toilet from your big dinner last night, and we certainly do not need a picture or GPS location of the offending download to the porcelain receptacle. Yes, share yourself, write about the interesting things that shape your life, random thoughts that make your laugh, the places your go , the people you meet, but for god sake, sometimes there is REALLY NO NEED TO SHARE!
Twittiquette Rule #4: FRIEND COLLECTORS BE GONE: Your no TOM, you don’t need to be everyone friend just for the sake of saying you have 100,000 friends, Really stop it.
Twittiquette Rule #5: DON’T BE A TWEET WHORE: There is no need to dominate a conversation, in person or on Twitter. If you send more than 2-3 tweets out at a time, you will come off as obnoxious, and I don’t think that is the look you were going for.
Twittiquette Rule #6: LESS SELF PROMOTION MR MARKET GURU: Twitter is a good way to promote your business. I have made both relationships and real dollars though the responsible use of social media. Tweeting gobs of self plugging is just wrong….. in Twitter terms… bird poop.
I manage a fairly significant portfolio of both small and larger advertising clients, but it seems that it takes and act of congress to get my ads approved on the MSN network.
So, why do I go through the trouble of advertising with MSN?
It converts, when you can get your ads approved. I have found it to convert about 20% higher than Yahoo and 45% better than Google, though its traffic is MUCH lower than either engine.
MSN ad center has less competition on various key word groups, I assume its because my competition has less patience than me continually resubmitting traffic requests.
Once it set up it takes very little maintenance to maintain paid search rankings. Again, I assume this is because of the previous reason. Their approval guidelines work against MSN’s best interest.
My advice to marketeers looking to advertise on MSN ad center
Start with a good glass of Merlot and soft music, because soon my friend you too will be frustrated.
Spend time in exploring the MSN ad Center. Not all of the links you were looking for will be in easy to find places, so take a little time and explore each page.
Below are my Top tips to solving your Ad Center woes…
When creating your key terms be careful with plural/singular terms – MSN sees many of them as the same. Though this only seems to hold true with English terms.
Use a suggestion tool like word tracker, Google, or Yahoos word suggestions to compile your list.
Limit your key words too many keywords will be rejected. It appears that Ad Center has a limit of 10,000 per submission.
Though I do not see MSN’s Ad Center being as picky as Google in directing clicks to a contextually relevant landing page it could not hurt. Especially when trying to convert visitors into buyers.
Avoid Duplications – MSN “sees” words such as “of”, “for”, “an”, “a” as dupes.
Export an existing order and use that as your base template.
Keep your ad titles and keywords under MSN’s limits. Check your character lengths especially if using {keyword} and {params} as you might dynamically insert a phrase that’s too long. As a reminder the limits are as follows: Ad Title = 25 chars. Description = 70 chars. Display URL = 35 chars.
When doing a mass upload to the Ad Center remember that the file size limit. Check that your .xls or .csv is no larger than 2mb.
If uploading a “.xls” file check that the other tabs in the file have no data within them.
If your title or description contains a comma then make sure that you encase the data within that column with double “quotation marks, like so”
Add the MSN Ad Center domain to your list of trusted domains within your browser settings to avoid any security issues.
Use Internet Explorer as your browser when spending a lot of time in MSN’s Ad Center. For some reason the MSN ad center and the Firefox browser doesn’t play well together. There could have been other factors at play, and I would never say that MSN would ever not play fair, but it seems I encounter less online submission errors or browser crashes when using the IE browser over FireFox, when it pertains to the ad Center.
If your ads were denied, try try again. If there explanation of disapproval made no sense, its not suppose to, welcome to the world of off shoring your customer service . In order to fast track the approval process try 1) resubmitting the ad after making any modification to the copy. If there is any consistency with MSN’s editorial approval process, it is the inconsistency of their approval process that can work both against or in your favor. 2) Contact support at 800-518-5689 (from 9 am – 9 pm PST), trying to email them is a VERY big waste of time. Though the person on the other end sometimes seems like they have better things to do than service your account, it pays to me overly polite. If you can find the right person to answer your call, they will even give you insight and suggestions to improve your search campaign.
Steve Ballmer, if you REALLY want to compete with with Google without getting your ass handed to you, please, take the following suggestions to heart…..
Your ad review process absolutely sucks. I appreciate the fact that I have received numerous apologies from Ad Center staff concerning the inconsistent, arbitrarily disapproving of my key words, but it seems that a little standardization in ad approval training world go a very long way.
Please drug test the team or individuals that put together your Ad Center interface. Pretend that web masters would like comparative traffic pricing and history on the search ability of key words. If your at a loss for creative ideas, copy Yahoo’s interface.
Start acquiring additional search partners. You have great traffic, just not enough of it. There are 45 potential acquisitions of smaller search networks that would make a big difference to your bottom line. Call me for a good M&A list, for a nominal fee … sorry started the selfless plug early.
Embrace vice traffic sources. Google makes huge profits in catering to vice, I personally know several individuals that spend $10 million+ dollars per year in gaming, dating, pharmacy, and more. Taking such categories off of your flag list would do wonders for your revenues and traffic partners.
Follow Google’s method and bot the target site. If the site is very relevant than set a lower base. If the web master is just key word squatting, then charge a much higher base. This will make web masters choose key words more wisely, and more importantly, give them higher e-commerce conversions if the landing page matches the contextual content that it was targeted for.
I have lots of other suggestions for your Ad Center, but I am not feeling the love since I have had a few more ads disproved this morning, and its too early to drink…… damn.
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