“Pulling A Slater”
Maybe we are just too old school; being disgruntled at work is nothing new. Indeed, airline employee numbers are down again this year – it has reached a 13 year low. Does this demonstrate that airline employees are under pressure? Absolutely!
Now let’s delve into that for a minute. Flight attendants, in particular, are members of a long suffering profession. Squashed (hard) as they are between management cutting costs and customers expecting those airline ads to be vaguely accurate. When fantasy and reality meet, there is usually friction. But in the airline industry its really rough. Flight attendants are where the fantasy and reality of air travel meet.
But it was always so. It is a testimony to this profession that under continued working difficulties for decades that we have NEVER had seen a flight attendant “go postal” like Mr Slater. Consider how many airlines have gone out of business and the thousands of flight attendants who have lost jobs. Airlines have chosen the people to handle this work carefully and well. Flight attendants are a special breed. They handle crises every day. Testy passenger? No problem, just another one of the hundreds around the world today. Smile, be firm, polite and defuse the situation. Problem dealt with. Or so the script says.
Clearly something deviated dangerously from the script in the recent case at jetBlue. The fact that Mr Slater is apparently to be given a reality show is (for travel industry) people too much – it is an insult.
Just review the facts – he deployed an emergency chute which, had it struck anyone, could have caused serious injury or maybe worse. It caused an aircraft to be pulled out of service – an expensive item which he should pay for at minimum. Making his dramatic exit with two beers in hand demonstrates a level of cavalier arrogance that is stupefying. Add to this invectives over the plane’s PA system prior to the exit and you start to see a picture of a person who was and may still be seriously unbalanced. He was manifestly a threat to passenger safety. Were a passenger to have done this, said passenger would still be in jail. Think about this – would you hire him?
In fact the whole incident is so out of character for the profession one has to wonder if this was not part of something bigger. The quick Hollywood reaction may have come too quickly. But we have yet to see if this was a stunt. If it is, it surely represents new depths of bad taste.
On the bright side, the airline involved has remained pristine, as they should. The profession has not been impugned as it might have. Indeed, industry reaction has been consistent and admirable. During a time when social media took this story and ran with it, note that among industry professionals there has been no cheering for this lunatic behavior. The only voices who seem to think this was even vaguely explicable are people outside the travel industry. Hopefully they will stay there. The industry has enough to contend with.
Old Media is still effective
Even as we like to promote the power and impact of new media, it is crucial to understand that old media remains very powerful. For example, start here.
Now this story about corporate cultures is really important in these days of a total love affair among airlines for mergers. These financial creations serve to cover over what is clearly a messy new culture and hence the story linked to. Mergers are not quite the panacea they are made out to be – but that’s for a different blog post.
The interesting this here is this – the linked story came via an email from an airline colleague who works for Continental, and therefore from a source who enjoys, with a perverse pleasure, anything denigrating Delta and his ex-employer, Northwest.
But notice how “old media” has climbed on the bandwagon of new media. Notice for example that every news piece you see these days comes festooned with little icons – like these. 
Here’s the takeaway for travel industry folks – the really erudite professional people in old media are “getting it”. These word merchants who know a great punch line or devastating turn of phrase are going to use new media to spread their ideas. While we mortals struggle to say something in under 140 characters, professional wordsmiths do this with their eyes closed.
We are seeing that old media can adapt – that means the most influential voices that follow your industry, but were perhaps without a global audience, are now going global.
The big thing is mobile
Everyone in travel talks about mobile as the next big thing. Travel suppliers have not really kept up with the rapid deployment of this technology. Consumers have adopted smartphones and other mobile devices at very rapid rates. Apple’s blowout sales of the latest iPhone and shortly before that the iPad are illustrations of how keenly consumers are adopting mobile technology. Clearly travel suppliers need to be devoting considerably more resources to this.
The primary consideration for this focus is that a travel vendor literally gets taken along in the consumers’ digital “stuff”. By offering tools to the consumer, a travel vendor creates an immediate long tail sales process. Here is an example of such a process – even if the passenger was never a big British Airways fan to start with, and after the strikes there a lot more such people, by enabling a digital relationship upon boarding, the passenger immediately is invited to develop a digital relationship.
While kudos go to SITA for creating this, even more go to British Airways for its adoption. This is very smart. Pity it only gets exposed to so few people each day. But it is a great start in the right direction.
Clever use of Klout
Last year when we first started working on the original Airlines Using Social Media Report, we recommend to the airlines we connected with that they should sign up for Klout’s free service. It turns out that Virgin America has now gone one better – take a look here.
This idea is good because the airline is looking for highly influential people online (read bloggers) and offering them a ride to Toronto and back. In other words the blogger’s time and influence is priced cheaply – the cost to the airline is marginal at most. Certainly on a new flight, it will not be flying full of revenue passengers. But with these bloggers at 35,000 feet Tweeting and sending messages, you can be fairly certain that thousands upon thousands of people will be hearing about this new flight. The bloggers appear “cool” because they were chosen as among the influential few. Virgin America will get great ROI on this idea.
Other airlines, and even lodging firms, can learn from this. Leverage your resources – and it does not always mean cash.
Research video #1
They say “What happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas”. In the emerging media world, that statement can be modified to say “What gets captured on social media, stays public forever”.
Here’s an example for those of you who have manage crises – imagine dealing with this. Taxpayer money seemingly wasted or a serious emergency? Of course on YouTube there is no context – just the video and you are left to draw your own conclusions. Most likely this is going to make the RAF and the pilot look bad – no context always does. Take a look at the comments listed under the video at this site. Practitioners of crisis management can only wince in sympathy.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB5CXlEALJ0]
More stage setting
Here’s another video that gets the message across – fast.
Setting the stage
To get you started about social media and its ever growing impact, we recommend you check out this short video.
Welcome!
Hello and welcome to a novel way of offering insight on social media as it impacts the travel industry . To date we have developed reports based on many interviews, much research and thinking about the subject. But we are now enmeshed in Web 2.0 – so what are we thinking by delivering this insight via a report? It’s dead as soon as it leaves Adobe and works its way to your email box.
So, in recognition of how the world has moved, we intend to produce reports in this format – and involve you in the process. What this means is that we will do what we normally do; research, interview and analyze. Results will then be posted on the site. As events evolve which require an update on any section of the analysis, we will update this.
What’s your role? Well, you get to post comments, ask questions and respond to your colleagues right here. In other words, we want to create a place where not our analysts but even our clients build and add to the knowledge base. As a living space we enable new people to work their way through the cumulative thinking to see how we arrive at wherever we are when they join us.
That said, please feel free to jump in and ask questions and share your our thoughts. If you have something you feel strongly about please contact us directly.