Marriott’s great use of Twitter in a crisis

Terror attacks targeting luxury hotels in Jakarta is today’s headlines. The recent explosion at the Ritz-Carton killed at least 9 people and the police have found an unexploded bomb in a room of the nearby Marriott hotel. The bomb was found and defused as police searched the luxury hotel following the bombing in its basement, which killed seven people earlier in the morning.

Marritot have been twittering about the incident, and I think it’s a great example of how useful Twitter can be as a tool to instantly interact with the public.

Marriott sent the first tweet about 6 hours ago ‘To all who have tweeted, we are gathering info and will have more as we learn details from Jakarta.’ Thereafter subsequent tweets have provided useful information, support to the victims and their families as well as phone numbers and an update once everyone had been evacuated and the area secured.

Air France have also tweeted the Progress Report from the French Air Accident Investigation Bureau for the crash involving Air France flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris-Charles de Gaulle.

Travel Superbrands

Superbrands UK revealed today the list of top 500 consumer brands as chosen by a panel of experts and more than 2,000 UK consumers. The survey defines a Superbrand as having established "the finest reputation in its field". The big surprise was Microsoft kicking Google off the top position.

Last year 21 travel brands made it into the top 500 Superbrands, this year 17 made it. A mere 3.5% of the total list are travel clients. Apparently is an “achievement in itself” to make the list of top UK Superbrands, and needless to say many large travel brand failed to make the top 500 list. In fact Superbrand's methodology is pretty controversial and Kevin May at Travolution has written an excellent post about the confusion over the Superbrands list.

British Airways was the only travel company in the top 10 brands; they managed to climb one position this year to number 4.

The travel companies that fell off the list were: Qantas, Virgin Trains, Centre Parcs, Cathay Pacific, Eurotunnel, Expedia, Lufthansa and Lastminute.com

The new travel entries were: P&O Ferries, Royal Caribbean International, Radisson Hotels & Resorts and Holiday Inn.

The travel brands that showed the strongest year-on-year improvement were Cunard “the most famous ocean liners in the world’ up 136 places, Virgin Atlantic up 59 places, National Express up 52 places and Thomas Cook up 46 places.

The highest new entry into this year's list was P&O Ferries in position 176, indicating brand kudos for relatively low cost travel alternative in the downturn.

Year-on-Year Comparison Table below for Travel Superbrands

Airlines on Twitter

There has been a lot of talk about Twitter and the value to travel companies of having a microblogging service. Twitter has evolved since its launch about 4 years ago. I have recently conducted some research into looking at how airlines are using twitter, and their current activity levels.

Twitter is a great way of promoting offers, provide company information and not least to engage with customers.

As with many new social media technologies, Soutwest Airline is currently leading the field with 278,657 followers, 7,981 following, and 2,842 updates as of today, check out http://twitter.com/southwestair. In fact, they skewed my chart so I had to remove them from the graph below. Their customer focused tweets are best-of-breed, but other airlines such as Air New Zealand are closely following suit.



How can Twitter be used successfully?

Twitter is a fantastic tool for seeding exclusive offers. Dell has proven this by reporting that their http://twitter.com/delloutlet Twitter account has generated more than $3 million in revenue. Dell use this account to send out offers and vouchers exclusive to their 600,000 Twitter followers, the offers are then spread by their followers to the people that they follow.

The best offers promoted through Twitter are exclusive to the Twitter followers. If users feel they can grab an exclusive deal they are more inclined to become followers and they are more likely to recommend it. My research shows that currently no airline that I’ve come across offer Twitter exclusive offers, so it will be interesting to see who is the first to utilise this opportunity.

It is reported, that only 9% of outbound traffic from Twitter is to a transactional site. It is therefore important that that the Twitter account is not solely used to promote offers. And in fact the airlines with the lowest level of followers i.e. Flybe, Aer Lingus, KLM UK, Easyjet Promos. Air France Uk and Iberia are all primarily focusing on non-exclusive offers and are not engaging with the audience. A low level of interaction seems to also be common for the airlines with the lowest level of followers. Flybe for example have only created 6 updates, and Iberia and Quantas US 7 updates each. Twitter requires time and effort. I have heard (through the great wine) that Southwest Airlines have one dedicated person that only deals with Twitter, which probably explains why they are doing so well. To successfully market on Twitter, it is vital to engage with the community and keep engaging – which requires resource, time and effort.