European carrier BMI is happily throwing the uncontrolled madness of Twitter conversations onto its destination pages with a few exceptions, especially any mention of competitors.
Each of BMI’s destination landing pages for cities around the world has an built-in feed of Twitter messages where the city is mentioned in the text.
The destination guides (Chicago, for example) also include maps, tips about restaurants, hotels, things to do, useful links and travel-related content.
But it is the wholesale handover of a sizeable chunk of its web page real estate to something as random as Twitter messages that is perhaps the most interesting.
BMI says the feeds are moderated only for “swearing, competitors and racial slurs” as it wants the pages to demonstrate its belief in transparency.
It is unclear [awaiting a response] how BMI continually polices the Twitter feeds for a relatively high number of destinations of the site and over a 24-hour period.
The system was tested last year during the political unrest in Iran. BMI says it did not monitor the activity at the time despite the airline having a route to the capital Tehran.
Update: “We rely on the filter list to automate most of it – if we know a destination is particularly sensitive – we would manually monitor it,” an official says.
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About Kevin May
Complete waste of resources. Twitter is about random chat. I checked Guide to Lyon and saw:
@Perelito: “The final test of a gentleman is his respect for those who can be of no possible service to him.” –William Lyon Phelps
@itsEmilyA
@jackeehamp: with @bobhamp in S. Lyon doing wii with his mom and Mark. #wiinotasfitaswiiliketobelieve
@nickjonaseurope: Q: Clermont-Ferrand where do you live? A: At Vienne near to Lyon ! i was at Clermont-Ferrand last Wednesday for a gig !
What’s the pertincence to Lyon flights/travel? None. So, if on top of that you have to pay someone to moderate this for “swearing, competitors and racial slurs” but not for “does this relate to Lyon travel/flights”, where is your ROI?
I can’t really see what is wrong with the destination pages they offer sometime a little unique, i show my latest 3 tweets on my site. I’m impressed that they are taking the effort to filter the stream, most other sites don’t even take that precaution.
As for policing them, i think you fail to understand social media, its not meant to be clean and clear, its real people talking about a destination. Accept not everyone uses social media in the same way, you should be encouraging Travel companies to try new features.