Only The Brave Blog The Not-So-Friendly Skies?
Almost everyone I know who travels for business has gotten stuck somewhere in the last few months (JFK, ORD, SFO, you name it). And almost everyone I know who works in PR or social media has felt compelled to blog about it if they didn’t get the refund they felt they deserved (which is why, I’ve found, most justified airline refunds are given if the word blog is tactfully inserted into the complaint). But it begs a question: if everyone’s blogging about the airline industry, where are the airlines in this conversation?
Blogging in the airline industry is far from widespread; Southwest’s folksy effort debuted a little over a year ago, in April 2006, and Delta (better known for firing flight attendant Ellen Simonetti for blogging back in 2004) debuted their blog on August 23. But it kinda makes you wonder; if you look at most of the other airlines out there - United, American Airlines and US Airways/America West - they want nothing to with it. Sorry guys: no blog, no link-love.
Why aren’t these companies blogging? It’s probably because they’re more afraid of negative bloggage or negative comments on their blogs; as it is, they’ve already got enough trouble in the blogosphere (like, say, United’s current brouhaha on Consumerist.) Smaller carriers like Frontier and JetBlue are just as cautious, and both lack full-fledged blogs (although JetBlue CEO David Neeleman’s comment-less “blog” emulates one.)
The closest thing I can find to a multi-carrier consumer-facing industry-wide blog of any size is USA Today’s Today In The Sky blog. And what an active blog it is. Even postings that go up over seemingly non-controversial topics (like AA’s new JFK terminal) manage to garner 6 long comments in six hours! This is clearly an industry whose customers are ready for blogging. The rationale: frequent travelers are generally business travelers, and many business travelers read blogs.
So, how can these “timid” carriers (United, American and US Airways) be lured into blogging? Well, they need to be convinced of the fact that the conversations they would have are going to have business value. Their concern is this: they’re afraid they can’t talk about what they know (e.g why, say, overbooking by 120-200% is a normal business practice or why airline food is now sold a la carte) and still obtain new customers or keep teh customers they already have. Well, maybe they should hunker down for a few weeks and read the Dell blog, where four of the seven recent posts are in response to customer complaints and problems. Each posting has between 10 and 450 comments. This is engagement.
And, sure, some of these comments are uninformed gripes. But a majority of them are intelligently worded. And the posts that show customers helping other customers and answering one another’s questions seems to outnumber the angry complaints by about two to one. Sometimes, just putting yourself out there and taking a chance is more valuable, in terms of long-term brand building than the short-term control that the blogless approach provides. Dell blogger Lionel Menchaca has become a bit of an I.T. Sonny Crockett, coolly emerging from one squall after another. As he pointed out on his blog (via Buzzmachine): “Customers really are in control - and it’s okay. I think more companies are starting to acknowledge this, but it’s a concept that scares the heck out of them. I’m willing to bet that this is still a key reason less than 10% of Fortune 500 companies maintain a blog.”
Menchaca has learned one crucial piece of info: when Dell started its blog last July, nearly 50% of the commentary about Dell in the blogosphere was interpreted as negative; one month ago, that number had decreased to about 23%. They may not be all the way to where they want to be, but, for one year’s worth of work, what a payoff. Maybe the other three airline carriers will be willing to play in 2008.
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