Very Interesting Breakdown: Qantas A380 incident: a lesson in social media and web PR

Today’s emergency landing of a Qantas Airbus A380 at Changi Airport in Singapore was another example of how travel companies need to establish a solid social and web PR strategy.

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Firstly, let’s get what actually happened out of the way, by way of official confirmation from Qantas after the event.

Flight QF32 from Singapore to Sydney, Australia, left Changi Airport at 10am (Singapore time).

The aircraft experienced a problem with one of its engines shortly after take-off and returned immediately to Singapore, to be met on the runway by fire crews following reports of smoke coming from the engine.

Footage from the BBC (above) illustrates the damage to the affected engine. Qantas has grounded its fleet of six A380s ahead of a full investigation.

But the modern demands of the 24-7 news cycle and the more recent addition of social media meant that the picture in the immediate aftermath was confusing to say the least, and terrifying for friends and relatives of passengers at worst.

See this short article on Reuters:

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At the same time as these clearly inaccurate reports were emerging, passengers were tweeting pictures from the aircraft of the damage.

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The situation was so chaotic in the initial hours after the incident that Qantas officials were supposedly telling Australia media that no wreckage was found on the small Indonesian island of Batam as a dramatic and pretty incriminating photo was spreading around the web.

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Eventually the airline and officials on the ground got their ducks in a row and released a statement on the airline’s website.

But in a world often led by news reports emanating or spreading through social media, perhaps Qantas did not react as quickly as it could.

To its credit, Qantas placed a message on the airline’s Facebook page and has responded a number of times to some of the comments left on the post.

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But the rather unwieldy and viral world of Twitter is more immediate (some might call it live) and is where crisis, or incident, management needs to take place.

Qantas has two Twitter accounts: one for its US division and another known as Qantas Travel Insider, offering tips for travellers.

The former has not updated its account with any information about the incident, meaning one of the most recent messages sits rather awkwardly under the current circumstances.

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The latter gave an update of sorts when asked about the incident, but was arguably not particularly helpful either.

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Thankfully the entire incident ended safely, which is clearly the most important thing.

But how it was dealt with in the immediate aftermath – when social media has a tendency to spiral out of control, unless a coordinated approach is carried out – will be an abject lesson from which other airlines and travel companies can easily learn.

UPDATE: Another Qantas aircraft, a Boeing 747-400, was forced to return to Singapore’s Changi Airport on Friday 5 November after problems with one of its engines.

NB: Hat-tip @travelfish for picture sourcing.

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I so appreciate @BrianSolis Excellent Posts! Gold Mine! 'Introducing Your Friends, Fans and Followers'

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Introduction:

"Social Media is among many things, our gateway to discovery and interconnection. While social networking may seem trivial, truth is that we get out of it what we put into it. But this goes beyond the time and energy we spend on day-to-day participation. Our investment in social media earns its largest dividends when intent and purpose meet personification and engagement....."

Read the full post on Brian Solis' most EXCELLENT blog:

http://www.briansolis.com/2010/12/bringing-the-brandgraph-to-life-introducing...

Social Media Integration w. Movie Marketing: Farmville Goes Hollywood for MegaMind - Advertising Age

LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) -- Farmville is going Hollywood. As the Zynga web property begins to establish itself as an emerging mass-reach ad platform for advertisers such as McDonald's, 7-Eleven and General Mills, the popular social-media app is integrating Paramount DreamWorks Animation's "MegaMind" as its first film partner.

--> For 24 hours -- starting tonight at midnight to promote the film's Friday release -- Farmville users will be able to interact with a virtual Mega-Farm, hosted by the film's title character, and even purchase a ticket to see the film directly from the FarmVille world.

Anne Globe, DreamWorks' head of worldwide marketing, said the promotion was a good creative fit for the film's plot but also an efficient place to reach a wide audience, given FarmVille's 16 million daily active users and 56 million monthly users.

Read full post on AdAge.com

Why Environmental Activists Embrace Social Media | Fast Company

EnlargeBP, Social Media, Oil Spill

R.J. Matson


EnlargeBP, Social Media, Oil Spill

Oh No, You Didn't! Leroy Stick, on stage at TedxOilSpill, has led a Twitter battle against BP. | Photograph by Kris Krug


@BPGlobalPR We regretfully admit that something has happened off of the Gulf Coast. More to come. 3:07 PM May 19th via web

A young comedy writer awoke one morning a month after the Deepwater Horizon explosion and caught a video of the Coast Guard ordering reporters off a Mississippi beach. "It made me angry," the man now known publicly as Leroy Stick tells Fast Company. "It was just so clear to me that BP cared more about saving their brand than they did about saving the Gulf of Mexico. So I decided to make fun of their brand and their PR efforts on Twitter."

That first tweet opened lesson 1,001 in an ongoing course titled "In the Age of Social Media, You Do Not Control Your Brand." @bpglobalpr quickly picked up more than 190,000 followers, while the company's own account, the hastily started @bp_america, languished at a tenth of that. As the company made ham-fisted attempts at spin (Photoshopped helicopter, anyone?), Stick and his team provided a much-needed outlet for the public's outrage. Stick stayed in venal, clueless, and often hilarious character online, in the media, and in public appearances. "Comedy can be a great tool for telling the truth just because there aren't any rules," says Stick, who still declines to reveal his real name. "You can use satire to raise real awareness." With the well finally capped and Tony Hayward relieved of his CEO post at last, the big takeaway for corporations may be, to quote a BPGlobalPR -- created T-shirt: forget your brand. Tweets are cheap; it's what companies do, not what they say, that really matters.

Activists have donned suits in mockery at least since 1967, when Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies tossed dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. More recently, the Billionaires for Bush bird-dogged the RNC, and the Yes Men, a pair of pseudonymous activist-pranksters, starred in two documentaries in which they impersonate reps from Halliburton, the WTO, and Dow Chemical. (Stick shares a lecture agent with the Yes Men and calls them "rock stars.")

These days, venting anti-corporate anger is as easy as retweeting a joke, Photoshopping a parodic BP logo with an asphyxiating sea turtle, or creating a YouTube video called "BP Spills Coffee" (which has tallied more than 10 million views). Satire can help hold the powerful accountable when the public's attention threatens to wane. "It really comes down to storytelling -- if you don't tell your story well, someone else will tell it for you," says sustainability expert Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz.com. "BP is an example of how companies' misfortunes are going to unfold going forward with all the tools and weapons the Internet and social media afford."

BP presented a burlesque of corporate hypocrisy that not even Hoffman could have conjured: The oil company with the worst safety and environmental record of the Big Six is also the author of "Beyond Petroleum," one of the most successful green-rebranding campaigns ever seen. The real problem here was not that BP made PR mistakes; it was that their PR was too good. "Companies screw themselves when they let perception get ahead of reality," Makower says. "BP did a fabulous job with 'Beyond Petroleum,' but less than 1% of their revenue has ever come from renewables."

Ann Hand, who was BP's SVP of global brand and marketing during the heyday of the green-starburst campaign, later left to become CEO of Project Frog, which makes prefabricated high-tech green buildings for schools, health care, and retail. "With the Internet, I think branding is probably harder because you need to make sure that you're backing it up in the marketplace, that you have a culture that supports it and consistently lives up to that brand," she says. "It's been enjoyable for me to come to a company where we have measured results and happy customers." Better metrics -- millions paid in restitution to fishermen, acres of wetlands restored, and new dollars invested in green energy -- will be key if BP is to have any hope of regaining an estimated billion dollars in lost brand equity and immeasurable public trust.

Activists, for their part, hope that public scrutiny doesn't start and end with the click of a button. "I like the term 'slacktivism,' " says Nate Mook, the software entrepreneur behind TEDxOilSpill, a grassroots conference of scientists, environmentalists, and clean-energy advocates that featured Stick as a speaker. Mook argues that there must be more paths created for ordinary people to get involved, whether by donating money or by stirring interest with contests such as the Oil Cleanup X Challenge, a $1.4 million prize backed by Google CEO Eric Schmidt's wife, Wendy. "That's where you see social media being powerful," Mook says, "when it connects people to bring about real change."

Related Stories:

    Topics:

    Technology, Leadership, Management, Magazine, BP, deepwater horizon, social media, Joel Makower, GreenBiz.com, Ann Hand, project frog, tedxoilspill, Leroy Stick, BP plc, Fossil Fuel Energy Production, Abbie Hoffman, Nate Mook

    4 Out Of 5 Professors Use Social Media, Study Finds

    About 80 percent of professors use social media and more than half incorporate it into classroom activity, a new survey from Pearson reveals.

    The survey polled 1,000 professors on their media diet. The most common new media activity for faculty is watching video, both in and out of class.

    The study found that social media use is highest for humanities and social sciences teachers, and that long-tenured professors don't shy away from social media any more than their younger colleagues.

    But the Chronicle of Higher Education highlights an important nuance in social media consumption:


    Don't picture a nation of professors asking students to tweet in class. Only about 10 percent or 12 percent of survey responses represent "active" uses of social-media tools, meaning professors expecting students to post or comment on or create something, said Jeff Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group, which conducted the study with Pearson and New Marketing Labs. He contrasted that with "passive" activities like reading or watching a video.

    What do you think? Do you professors use social media?

    Get HuffPost College On Twitter!

    hmmm... I have not yet used twitter & hash tags in class... I may well....