This is the final combined steps four and five in my five step recommendation on what a travel supplier should do to build a social media strategy.

Critical to the first four steps in this recommendation is that launching a social strategy does not mean opening up a Twitter account or Facebook page and typing away.

Instead, I recommend holding off on signing up with social media sites until a series of preparatory steps are undertaken. They are

• Part One: Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say
• Part Two: Start monitoring social media
• Part Three: Collect data – all of it

Part Four: Craft product and content plans

Using the data collected, plans made and early monitoring, suppliers can now start to craft the product and content plans that will make up the social media plan strategy.

There are two parts to this step – developing product offerings and developing content plans. In the product area it is time to craft targeted deals and offers specific to social media distribution platforms and demand patterns.

Taking first steps at micro-targeting. Using the data collected and information provided from distribution partner and own sales channels to engage in targeted product development.

That is, the development of offers and product specifically designed to target the customers identified in part one and tracking and investigated in part two and three.

The offers/products developed should not be exclusively targeted at pre-sales activities or driving immediate transaction response.

As we discussed in part one, there are many different ways that consumers can be targeted without having to require an immediate transactional response.

Social media content and offers during and post consumption could be just as (if not even more) valuable than transactionally focused product.

This is where the communications development is as important as product development. Using the information collected in the first three steps to plan a whole of company customer conversation plan based on the developed social media goals.

Content creation is just as important as offer creation. The people/department responsible for your social content creation should be looking into both areas of content creation – proactively creating content on your own site and social media platform pages and in responding to user generated content across the web.

[NB: For more on content and UGC see Three rules for a UGC start-up]

It will take time and devoted effort to craft these product and content plans. It cannot be rushed.

Talking, writing, posting, updating and tweeting before you have crafted targeted offers and messages increase the risk of your conversation falling flat and lacking response.

Especially if you try to simply take offline and static web brand approaches and translate them into social posts.  In all likelihood you will find that each social channel requires a different target approach and therefore different content response.  This is a good approach.

With products prepared and content ready to go… it is time for the final stage.

And, the bonus one, Part Five: Start saying it and stick to it

Now you can open the accounts, sign up and start being social.  The critical part of this step is to be engaged for the long haul.

Do not dip into and out of social media. Make a long term commitment to creating content and products targeted to this channel.

Launching a content or product plan and then pulling out if response is low or the time commitment too hard is the wrong response.

If the plans are not working, stay committed but go back to step one and come at the strategy from a different angle.

A social media audience can take time to build and may require different angles that first planned.  Trying once then pulling out will take you out of the conversation – leaving it to others to drive the conversation around your brand.

In parts one and two we discussed deciding who you want to talk to and what you want to say and monitoring mentions of your brand in social media.

But even with these steps completed it is still not time to log on and starting tweeting, updating and commentating.

Next you need to know more about your product and which segments it is attractive to.

Part Three: Start collecting data. All of it. Every single piece you can

To communicate effectively with customers you need to know that they like to do and what they want.

Social media opens up the chance to talk to every customer as an individual. Futhermore it also gives you the chance to talk to different versions of each individual (my EveryYou concept).

I was asked at a recent AsiaPac Aviation Conference to name a successful global social media campaign.

Someone quickly responded with the Queensland Best Job in the World campaign. I proposed that that the long term impact from social media campaigns are not around trying to replicate the massive effort involved in a Best Job-esque campaign.

Instead, it is the ability to develop one on one communications at scale. To develop micro-targeted deals and communications, but at a level that can be rolled out to a large number of people.

In other words: many deals to many people (a one-to-one approach) rather than one-campaign-to-many-people.

For a travel supplier to build a campaign around micro-targeting at scale requires having data. Lots of data. Data about everything that a consumer does in relation to a booking.

Where they click, upstream and downstream links, demographic details, email preference etc. I am talking about more than Ominture and Webtrends.

This is also about collecting data directly from customers’ pre, during and post consumption of a product.  Data that can be used in targeting offers, deals and content.

Some examples:

• Hotel: Recording the checkin and pre-purchase habits of people that order room service or ask for restaurant advice. For example how many people who check in after 8pm at night order room service or ask for a restaurant. Collect data to find out how many as this will open up social media recommendation options.
• Airline: Complaints at check-in by time of day and customer characteristics (solo, family, business). Use this to try to find patterns of how external factors (time of day and nature of passenger) can lead to increases or decreases in complaints.  Use that as a basis for determine communications and ideas to reduce check in complaints.
• Car Hire: where you have GPS units in cars, anonymously track the routes that people take.  Use that to publish a “top routes” list or “favourite drives” list to customers and build up a touring network and conversation.  Use staff profiling of customers (family, work, adventure) to build sub-categories of tours.

Arming yourself with data like this will be critical in finding the right targeting of the right message and therefore essential to a social media strategy.

Suppliers should go so far as to create an incentive structure around data collection. Staff should be rewarded for the amount of valuable customer information they collect.

It goes without saying that you will need to invest in the infrastructure to collect, sort and manage this data (and there will be a lot of data).

So now you have the target audience and what you want to say.  You have started to monitor and are collecting all the data you can.

Next we will combine part four and five into a single recommendation  - crafting product and content plans, and actually doing it.

• Part One: Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say
• Part Two: Start monitoring social media
• Part Three: Collect data – all of it
• Part Four: Craft product and content plans

Air traffic group EuroControl came into its own as a customer-facing service – as well as central industry body - during the volcanic ash debacle in April this year.

The organisation was at the centre of coordinating logistics for ATC centres across the continent but also fronted the public message as the crisis crippled air travel for almost a week.

It used Twitter, for example, incredibly successfully as a method to update travellers eager to learn when various pockets of airspace would be opened or closed as the ash cloud moved across almost every country.

So it’s no surprise to see that EuroControl is pushing some of its existing data to a wider audience following the ash incident.

Central to the Tactical Channel on its website is a mapping system which outlines where and for how long air traffic delays are taking place around Europe.

So the display isn’t up to the quality of satellite photographs used by Google or Bing but this is a discipline based on air vectors and hard data, rather than providing the best user experience for consumers.

Other publicly available information now includes the total number of flights airborne and landed during a given day and reasons for air traffic delays, such as air and airport capacity issues, staff, weather problems and, err, accidents.

In part one I discussed strategy, deciding who you want to talk to and what you want to say. How looking to the messaging and audience is a must do before opening up social media accounts and submitting content.

In part two, I am still recommending that social media accounts are left unopened.

There is still more work to be done before a travel supplier should be creating socially distributed content.

Part Two: Start monitoring social media, make it a customer service and marketing priority

As I discussed here, consumers are turning more and more to social media sites to help them get more information on brands.

So it is important to set up the infrastructure (readers or monitoring tools) that scrape social media and review sites and serve up mentions of your brand, competitors and (if relevant) location to customer care and marketing teams.

Use this in the first instance to listen to what people are saying about you, your brand and competitive landscape.

Then settle and agree on the response you will take to various mentions.

For example:

• Agree the format for Twitter responses when customers make queries and complaints.
• Appoint some one in customer care to respond each day to negative (and positive) reviews on TripAdvisor.
• Find the forum(s) where customers are talking about your area or product or experience and monitor what is being said about the brand (eg Flyertalk or frequentflyer.com.au).
• Publish an internal social media policy that encourages your staff to be watching,  consuming and participating in social media.  But make it clear when they can and when they can’t speak for the company in a response.

In summary. build up a list of tools and set up an agreed and actionable plan for monitoring and responding to social conversations about your brand.

This will initiate your involvement in discussions initiated by consumers and prepare the ground for (hopefully) exerting some influence over that conversation.

Important points to remember:

• Influence is achievable but control is not.
• Be clear in your understanding and expectations.
• You will not be able to exert control over social media as it is word of mouth at the speed of light.

Combining parts one and two is the first step in setting a social media plan and help you find your voice, primarily by deciding which of your customers want to talk to and what you want to say.

The next rung on the ladder is to start monitoring all of the mentions of your brand in social media so that you can learn what is being said already by which segment of your customer base.

• Part One: Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say
• Part Two: Start monitoring social media
• Part Three: Collect data – all of it
• Part Four: Craft product and content plans

I am often approached by suppliers (mainly hotels) telling me that they have opened a twitter account, started a blog or set up a Facebook fan page but nothing is happening.

“What should I do?” they say. “I joined all the social networks but there is nothing there!”

From these discussions I have developed five steps for a supplier on how to plan, set up and execute a social media strategy.

I have previously covered trend driving social media adoption, but in this post I want to provide more detailed advice on implementing a social media strategy.

[By social media I mean online/interactive user generated content sites where there is no substantive restriction on who can create, share or contribute to content. Includes social media sites, forums, blogs and even comment sections in mainstream media]

Part One: Decide who it is you want to talk to and what you want to say

The assumed first step is to jump straight in, sign up for each and every social network and wait for the customers to come pouring in. This is a bad move.

The correct first step is to do the opposite, to stay clear of any proactive social media interaction until such time as you have decided who you want to talk to and what it is you want to say.

Jumping straight in without this ground work could result in one of these outcomes:

1. Nothing happening and no one cares – you sit there with no followers or friends and no means for building a following.
2. Too much happens and angry customers take over. There is a danger that a poorly monitored or executed social media strategy can leave open a chance for disgruntled consumers to become the dominant content providers. Most extreme example of this is the take over of the Nestlé’s Facebook page by Greenpeace in protest of Nestlé’s use of palm oil from endangered forest areas.

There are number of different angles that can be taken in deciding what to say and who to talk to. The angle chosen needs to be based on the brand identity and vision of the supplier.

Who you want to talk to:

• In deciding who you want to talk to, there are different classes of customers – existing customers, new customers, loyal customers, suppliers and more.  Decide which of these groups you want to talk to is critical before executing a strategy.

What you want to say:

• Similarly there are options in deciding what it is you want to say.  Do you want to push a message around your price, service, location, facilities or expertise?  Are you trying to communicate to people during their consumption of the service, before or afterwards?

It is possible but very very hard to cover all of these in one social media plan. The best approach is to pick the combination of these options that best suit your product. Here are some (hypothetical) examples of different angles that different suppliers could take:

1. A Budget Hotel: deciding on an approach of targeting new customers on rate and cleanliness.  Therefore will look to talk to customers about the deal value and the certainty of the product;
2. Adventure tour company: targeting their social media activity at existing customers that have already bought. Helping those customers prepare so that they get the most out of the experience and soliciting feedback and testimonials to help attract new customers;
3. A hotel near an event location: targeting loyal customers with information and discussion about events at a location and their knowledge of the location rather than the hotel itself;
4. An airline with a large leisure network: targeting new customers with general holiday information for their home market.  Driving discussion around generic holiday options rather than their on board product; or
5. A winter cruise tour company: identifying that consumer information about the destination is the most critical element rather than the specifics of the product. Building up a body of content about a location first rather than the product.

Social media distribution and usage is vastly different to traditional web retail and marketing.

To simply take a deal distribution approach or a join and hope approach will be a certain path to an unsuccessful strategy.

Before you do anything in social media take time to decide the customers you are targeting and what you want to say.

• Part One: Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say
• Part Two: Start monitoring social media
• Part Three: Collect data – all of it
• Part Four: Craft product and content plans

Qatar Airways launched a sparkling mobile version of its website this week and raised the question once again over how to prioritise mobile web development.

The Middle Eastern airline created the new service in conjunction with mobile content specialist Mobiqa, allowing passengers to fulfil a range of tools.

Customers can check-in, view flight status, select seats for departure as well as find out information on services and the airline.

As with most mobile websites, a browser is automatically detected so functionality and screen size can be optimised for the user.

Qatar has opted for the service over developing other types of check-in and passenger tools, boasting that the system works “without the need to download an application”.

This leads to an interesting question, and one which many airlines and other travel suppliers and services will no doubt be grappling with as they develop a mobile strategy.

What are the advantages of mobile browser version of a site over a dedicated app?

For some it will be development costs and the prohibitive nature of focusing resources on a product for one or more types of handset, rather than a general mobile web version.

But perhaps the flipside of the argument is whether the additional, not critical content such as guides and other information, which can be viewed without data roaming, is a value-add for customers and should be pushed into an app.

US-based Delta Airlines secured nothing if only bragging rights last week when it unveiled the world’s first airline booking engine within Facebook.

Obvious questions came over its effectiveness as a marketing tool, value to the consumer, impact on its existing booking channels and integration (or not) with existing social media features on Facebook.

The answers to all of these take nothing away from the fact that Delta is taking Facebook seriously and its move is likely to trigger a wave of similar applications being launched by other airlines.

But what of the other leading airlines around the world?

Here are the top ten global airlines, based on IATA figures for the number of scheduled international passengers carried in 2009:

Of course each has different passenger types, routes, online strategy – but what will be guaranteed will be that many of their customers will be members of the ubiquitous social network that is Facebook.

So what are they doing?

1. Ryanair

Ireland-based low-cost carrier Ryanair has famously shunned taking part in any form of social media, so it is difficult to establish if the two official-looking Ryanair pages on Facebook are genuine or not.

The first has laid dormant since December 2009 and contains just a handful of wall posts and a one-line piece of information about the company: “The best airline in the world! ” It still has 8,300 fans though.

The other site is very active, however, contains lots of messages and photos from its array of nearly 50,000 fans. Little interaction by the page administrator though.

2. Lufthansa

The German giant Lufthansa has an impressive 72,000 fans and has made plenty of effort with its official page, including competitions, photographs and a slideshow to show off some of the airline’s new features. Lots of good interaction between officials and customers, too.

3. EasyJet

Plenty of talk from EasyJet in recent months about its Facebook ambitions, including a booking engine. It is almost there, having integrated a search module in July 2010 and a social trip planning tool. With almost 33,000 fans, EasyJet is one of the more interactive of the major airlines on Facebook, conducting daily polls and quizzes and encouraging users to get involved with the page.

4. Air France

Air France uses its page for a combination of interaction and showing off its brand values as an airline. Plenty of conversation with its 22,500 fans (mostly, understandably, in French) but also some informative videos embedded into a dedicated channel on the page, including a day-in-the-life of a cabin crew member and footage of the maiden flight of the airline’s Airbus A380.

5. British Airways

Confusion all round when it comes to BA’s effort, with an official-looking page with 12,000 or so fans but very little interaction and the official page simply saying fans need to contact customer service with any questions.  The unofficial page has a pleasant selection of aircraft photographs though.

6. Emirates

With almost 75,000 fans, Dubai-based Emirates is in the Air France mould when it comes to entertaining customers. It has a good mix of interaction and informative posts alongside high quality videos extolling the virtues of its fleet and, of course, Dubai.

7. KLM

Sterling effort from KLM, making good use of the real estate available with plenty of content and things to keep its 65,000 fans interested. Rather unique tools include a widget to create luggage tags with a user’s own photographs and a handy map tool to redirect users to its smaller country pages.

8. American Airlines

Almost 70,000 fans on the American Airlines page with a high volume of users commenting on services (negative and positive) but much visible interaction from the airline. It also uses the page to plug its wifi services and iPhone app. Plenty of video content, too.

9. Cathay Pacific

The only airline in the top ten which uses its Facebook page to push how fantastic it would supposedly be to work for the carrier. Cathay Pacific Airways has Meet The Team and Join The Team sections as well as channels for photos, videos and questions – some of which are answered by staff.

10. Singapore Airlines

Standard offering from Singapore Airlines to entertain its 65,000 fans, with the page offering photos, videos and a wall for discussions, albeit predominantly one-way. Decent video showing off its in-flight entertainment system.

Another week, another financial collapse of a UK travel company – this time the news concerns Kiss Flights, a budget package specialist to Turkey, Spain, Egypt and Greece.

The worrying spate of company closures over recent weeks is being blamed on a number of factors – depending on who you listen to. Reasons vary from reliance on low-margined dynamic packages, consumers not rushing to the hoped for “lates” market, cash flow, etc.

In the UK the situation is increasingly bleak, with two big companies – Goldtrail and Sun4u – going under in the space of a few weeks, and now joined by Kiss Flights. Unfortunately in many cases the communication has either been poor or confusing.

For today’s victim, it was probably both.

After the news first emerged from mainstream news channels such as Sky and the BBC, KissFlights.com inevitably went down.

The site finally emerged an hour or so later with the following, slightly odd homepage.

This was obviously not exactly correct (it still has the same message, nearly four hours after the company officially folded.

Parent company Flight Options managed to get a brief message up on its website, clearly not as high-trafficked as its consumer-facing subsidiary.

Package holiday regulations ensure consumers that booked an ATOL-bonded package holiday are protected in the event of the seller going into administration, thus the redirection to the ATOL part of the Civil Aviation Authority website (regulators of the ATOL scheme).

Problem with the ATOL web service is that, probably for legal reasons, it uses the trading company name, rather than the consumer-facing name, so concerned passengers will be equally confused when arriving at the website.

Information about the collapse of Kiss Flights could only be found by clicking on International Flights Ltd.

Misleading to say the least…

With thousands of passengers either stranded overseas or with their travel plans in disarray, it is down to the CAA to ensure consumers are kept informed – but in a simple, coordinated, logical and meaningful way. Unlike today.

Embarrassingly for the those behind what should have been a simple communication exercise, the only place on the internet where consumers could find any up-to-the-minute information about the situation around Kiss Flights was, inevitably, Wikipedia – updated within minutes of the company’s collapse.

Update: No idea if this Twitter profile for @kissflights is genuine, but a timely and solitary status update.

US carrier Delta has secured bragging rights as the first airline to fully integrate a search AND booking engine into a Facebook page.

Airlines had until this week only managed to place flight search facilities into fan pages, with the user being re-directed to the carrier’s main and external website to obtain results and make bookings.

It was thought European low-cost carrier EasyJet would be the first to cross the finish line with a fully functioning booking system, having talked up the idea a number of times in recent months and paying plenty of attention to the flight search element of its fan page.

But Delta has beaten its European counterpart to it, announcing the launch of its own system just days after overhauling the homepage of its website.

Known as Ticket Window [needs application approval], users can select different search criteria and then view results from within the application, including route options, aircraft type, times and inclusive prices.

Once a fare is selected the user can enter the usual passenger and payment details and the booking is complete.

Delta says the strategy behind the move is to offer a booking mechanism within one of the most popular sites used by its passengers. The airline currently has around 33,000 fans on Facebook, a mere fraction of the 500 million registered profiles on the social network.

Although the functionality is reasonably limited, at least when comparing to other tools available on the existing Delta website, search and booking is on a similar level to the user experience on a mobile due to the limited module size and existing parameters of Facebook.

It does appear that the core functionality behind the search and booking widget is also being geared up for use elsewhere – Delta says the same tools will soon be made available on banner ads it uses as part of its online ad creative, similar to those seen on affiliate networks.

The Delta system was developed by Minneapolis-based software firm Alvenda.

Visitors to the Catalan version of Easyjet.com over the past few months may have noticed something slightly different about the airline’s website.

The low cost carrier has switched some of the functionality around on its homepage to give more exposure to the deals, offers and other channels it offers.

Existing site:

Catalan version:

Cosmetically the site has some changes being tested, as well as the core search tools taking a different position elsewhere on the homepage.

An official says the changes have been tested for “several  months” on the Catalan site only, primarily because of lower traffic volumes.

Interestingly the pilot appears not have fuelled any wider and immediate changes to the rest of the EasyJet system, with an official confirming the test was isolated to the Catalan version and alterations based on it are not expected elsewhere.

One area to note is that the design work on the Catalan site almost mirror that belonging to new search modules being used on the EasyJet Facebook page.