If you fly enough, you’ll have a bad experience on an airline.  It is inevitable and one bad experience does not describe an airline’s ability to delivery service.  Too many people judge airlines on one experience, in my opinion.

Social media can be similar.  One bad rant does not describe an airline.  However, one bad rant does have the potential to become the story.  Recognizing that, many airlines have adopted social media departments to help control the story.  I’m fine with that because why shouldn’t an airline be able to defend itself?

However, then there are the airlines who adopt social media solely to try to control the story and those airlines are missing the picture when it comes to social media.   Participating in the story is just one half of the objective to social media.  The other half is responding. 

In the social media sphere, it’s about quick and timely answers with real solutions.  Some airlines have figured that out, some haven’t.  Some airlines who have figured that out still slip and fall from time to time.  That’s the nature of the game in social media. 

It’s about risk.  Social media is about accepting a certain amount of risk in letting your social media department respond with a certain freedom accepting the idea that vetting an answer or only permitting non-responsive answers isn’t going to promote a good image.  Instead, airines who do this well accept the idea that you cannot always make a bad story go away even when you do answer appropriately.  Think Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines.

Now we have This Rant about American Airlines.  American Airlines doesn’t possess the kind of corporate culture that succeeds in social media.  The first word of advice I would give them is that if you cannot empower your social media team to make something happen, stay out of social media.  Lame responses really are worse than no response and, what’s more, they give your competition an opportunity to poke at you. 

What this gentlemen describes, I’m sad to say, is far more common than it should be.  His experiences are exactly what I have experienced over and over again.  They are the reason why it is a better bet for me to fly SWA or Airtran or Continental with a connecting city than it is to get on AA to fly someplace non-stop.  The really insulting part of it is that if you are flying from an AA hub, you more than likely are paying a higher price for that non-stop flight. 

Furthermore, these kinds of experiences including the social media Twitter response point up to just how little AA does value its customers.

Filed under: Airline News, Airline Service, Airline Social Media by ajax