benchmark report
airline marketing
social
British Airways ‘Perfect Day Live Twitter Tour Guide’
Scoot ‘The world’s longest virtual flight’ When the carrier decided to drum up some publicity by putting on a “virtual flight” for customers with smartphones, it might have expected the process to go without a hitch. Sadly their social media campaign, which involved inviting passengers to ‘board’ their vir tual flight on their smar t phone, suffered a series of technical glitches meaning that 5,000 of the registered competitors were unable to log into the app before the competition star ted, meaning only 2,000 people managed to par ticipate in the campaign, even after delaying the star t by 15 minutes. The concept was based on a ‘last-man standing’ concept, by inviting participants to board a virtual flight, and remain onboard by tapping a button every minute for as long as they could. The winner was awarded
SGD20,000 cash and free flights for a year. The problems, which included entrants being dropped unexpectedly from the app, led to escalating animosity towards Scoot, which received more than 1,000 comments on the issue on its Facebook page. Despite the hiccups, Mr Mohammed Firdaus Ismani, 29, outlasted more than 2,000 other contenders - by tapping on the button for a total of 18 hours - to win the grand prize of $20,000 and a year’s wor th of flights to any Scoot destination. Scoot sent out a lengthy email to all par ticipants apologising and explaining what went wrong. The airline is set to run the competition again, once they have the app up and running again.
Par t of British Airways £5bn investment over the next five years in a programme of improvements to make life more comfor table in the air and on the ground for customers, including developing their social media platform. The latest par t of this investment was to develop a ‘Perfect Day’ application to help piece together ideas of things to do in their destinations. As par t of a trial taking the airline’s Perfect Day app from the web to the city streets, a ‘live tour guide’ day was created back in April. The initiative made British Airways customers become live tour guides for the day. On April 11th, a blogger was guided around Rome in real time via live suggestions from customers using the airline’s Twitter feed. The trial was run in
par tnership with Cedar, who coordinated the event. Progress around the Italian capital was captured by a stream of photos thanks to a hi-tech mini camera, which took thousands of images automatically throughout the day. Travel blogger Paul Steele, owner of the highly popular Bald Hiker travel blog, tweeted on the British Airways account followers with hashtag #PDRome to describe where he went and to interact with the British Airways 270,000 twitter followers. The photos were shared on Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram and by posting on Facebook. The campaign however, only attracted a handful of responses with the hashtag. The video of the event only received 4,500 views.
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