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#finnairtweets
flightball
FINNAIR
This June, Finnair launched a companywide initiative that aims to help the airline become “the most Tweeted airline,” as Finnair puts it. Stretching beyond the centralized presence on Twitter by the Finnair social media team, employees are encouraged to use their personal Twitter accounts to tell tales of their life as a staff member at Finnair. The move is a potentially risky one, such as the possibility an employee’s Twitter message isn’t quite in line with what the airline would want to disseminate. But Finnair Social Media Manager Aku Varamäki is conf ident though, saying that “A major par t of this is that you have to trust employees. We trust our employees with a lot of key operations responsibilities. If we can trust them to f ly planes, then we can trust them on Twitter.”
JULY 2014 ISSUE
BRUSSELS AIRLINES
The Twitter initiative is entirely voluntary, but Finnair hopes to become the airline with the most number of employees using the social media platform. The project kicked off with a day of lectures and training sessions, and the star of the inaugural tutorials was Arman Alizad , a popular Finnish TV personality and avid Twitter user and marketer with over 65k followers. Finnair will train 200 employees over 20 training sessions dedicated to social media marketing. Finnair currently has four Twitter handles, each for a specif ic purpose: main account , customer service , news and https://twitter.com/FinnairJapan (Japanese market). The airline’s main Twitter handle also lists all employees who are tweeting .
In early June, Brussels Airlines f lew the Belgian national soccer team (the Red Devils) to São Paulo for the 2014 World Cup. For this f light ‘SN2014’, Brussels Airlines painted one of its A330s in the Belgian Red Devils colours. Adding to the soccer theme, the aisle was lined with turf and the door panels separating Business Class from economy had life size action photos of Red Devils players (images here ). Brussels Airlines also came up with an original way to offer the public the chance to win a ‘fan f light package’ , called Flight Ball . Flightball works like a real football f ield except that players are replaced by planes f lying in real-time over Begian airspace. To monitor the aircrafts, Brussels Airlines par tnered with aircraft tracking provider Casper for the provision of real-time data,
which turned actual airplanes into the vir tual players in the game. To par ticipate in the ‘aircraft soccer game’, players had to log in to the Flight Ball website and were assigned an arbitrary opponent. They then added a vir tual balloon, placed one goal post at the Nor th Sea and another one in the Ardennes region of Belgium. The planes f lying above Belgium at the time of the game would then play the vir tual soccer game and the winner had to answer the contest question. Those answering the question correctly had the chance to be invited for the Flight Ball f inal. The f inal was played on June 10 at the headquar ters of Brussels Airlines — after which the winner directly boarded the same f light to Brazil as the Red Devils.
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EXPERIENTIAL SOCIAL DIGITAL TRADITIONAL
