Royal Caribbean Intl.’s Oasis of the Seas, the world’s largest cruise ship at 220,000 gross registered tons, today began its maiden Atlantic crossing from Turku, Finland, to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the cruise line rolled out an ambitious social media campaign in anticipation of the ship’s scheduled December 5 inaugural passenger sailing.
The cruise line is publishing weekly webisodes like this.
A countdown clock documents the time before the ship’s scheduled arrival in Port Everglades, and its current position is plotted using Google Maps.
Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. Chairman and CEO Richard Fain has a thing ot two to say about the ship in his blog, and Royal Caribbean Intl. President and CEO Adam Goldstein chimes in, too.
Royal Caribbean provides webisode updates via RSS, and one of the line’s twitter accounts tweets about the ship and offers links like this.
Stung by the Royal Champions episode earlier this year, Royal Caribbean apparently is making good on its pledge to use its own voices to speak directly with travelers and travel agents, too.
Still, the execution of its social media policy, from the webisodes to Fain’s blog and the OasisandAllure twitter account, is stilted and heavy on corporate-speak.
The webisode above amounts to a sort of video press release.
Here’s a run-of-the mill OasisandAllure tweet: “Did you hear the news today? Oasis of the Seas will have 7 godmothers to celebrate our 7 neighborhoods! Stay tuned…”
I fear people will tune out with tweets like that.
Fain’s blog is more of the same as he writes, of the Oasis of the Seas’ delivery: “Few people ever get a chance to work with such remarkable, passionate and dedicated professionals. Few people ever get to see such an amazing undertaking overcome all hurdles and reach fruition.”
Goldstein’s blog is a notable exception to the corporate pablum and the Royal Caribbean social media team should take heed and learn from him.
Here are some snippets from Goldstein’s post prior to the ship’s delivery about his first 30 hours on board the Oasis of the Seas.
- The fitness center is already open for workouts even though the ship isn’t ours yet. 35 minutes into my workout someone shut the power off in the gym. That doesn’t happen at home. Maybe we won’t accept the ship.
- Even though we can see our breath, which should not happen in the Caribbean, it is majestic in Central Park [a venue on the ship] at night. And Central Park is still a partial construction site missing 12,000 plants and trees.
- Usually an onboard announcement is introduced by the familiar ding-ding-ding that we now have in our television announcements. For unknown reasons the shipyard personnel testing the public address system have replaced the ding-ding-ding with something that sounds like a cross between a sick sheep and a drunk cow. Maybe this is one of the techniques for getting through a long dark winter.
Alas, amidst the clatter of the cruise line’s social media marketing jargon, Goldstein offers up a human voice.
Royal Caribbean needs some more of that.
[...] Royal Caribbean sets social media adrift with Oasis of the Seas crossing [...]