henkybaby

Oddly enough the success of KLM's efforts has been to allow and sometimes even encourage weirdness. There is no censorship apart from the obvious racial slurs etc. It has - eventually - a sort of self cleaning effect. Don't forget that KLM's Facebook page is rather more popular than FT...

shorthauldad

Did you check out https://twitter.com/HeathrowAirport ?

...and you think that doing contact by email leads to copy/paste replies and/or meaningless apologies?

Half today's LHR tweets are about some celeb or other performing something or other in T5, never mind apologies, that's just meaningless! Seriously, look at the signal-to-noise ratio posted through this account. "Collective wisdom" has nothing to do with that at all.

shorthauldad

I bet you a whole bundle of Avios that KLM make no money(i.e. real ROI) off their FB page, whereas the owners/operators of FT are probably making a steady profit off this site.

dnajockey

Very interesting thread - will be dug up in 10 years and laughed at , with many responders saying "What's email?????"

Maybe!

Active twitter presence great (not the current spam-a-thon)- but I repeat , 24/7 phone lines first, please.\

For a real insight into corporate twitter usage try @arenaflowers or @waterstones oxford street

shorthauldad

Agree - sort of - but far more likely we we laugh at this thread and say: "what's Facebook" !!

* Ten years ago FB didn't exist
* not so very long ago (2005?) Murdoch paid $580 million for a company called "MySpace"

henkybaby

I think you are mixing metaphors. BA do not make any money from the TV channels they advertise on... The BAEC CSD do not make any money of the phone lines that are installed by BT. It is a channel to communicate, not a profit centre.

shorthauldad

Aha! There I was thinking that companies bought TV advertising for a reason (something about "customers" and "selling product(s)"??).

They just do it because they've got too much money?

BBC: Facebook 'like' adverts tested with VirtualBagel experiment:

T8191

Confession 1: In my alter ego I use Facebook a lot. In fact I'm very busy there trying to raise funds for a Canadian non-profit. Not sure that having over 1,300 'friends' helps a lot - so far only 19 have done a simple click. Ho-hum.

Confession 2: … and a Twitter account, which is a complete waste of my time in the environment I work in. It's 97% of what it says on the box.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to contact a US Police Department over a minor [$50] traffic violation. Their website is unhelpful, in that it requires the complexity and cost of an International phone call. They do, however, list emails for senior staff, but those aren't answered. So, in despair, I've just [10 minutes ago] sent the Chief of Police a fax - and my fax machine suggested it went to a different number to that quoted on their website.

All a bit like BA on a bad day when you're down-route, really. It's all very good and clever if it all works, but somehow I remain unconvinced. And no, I am definitely not techno-phobic. I use it all the time, but so many agencies are utterly useless at making this super-technology actually work properly. When ba.com does what it says on the box, it may be time to move to the next stage …

henkybaby

You're mixing metaphors again. What is unique about Social Media is that allows interactivity. Yes, you can use it for marketing purposes but there is no direct relationship between advertising and revenue (although add agencies would love to prove me wrong) but you can also use it as a channel for communication which makes it no difference from a website/call centre.

It is this 'multitasking' that makes social so interesting. However, it seems that people are either very much against or they see its purpose. Not much fence sitting going on.

PS: the 'like' functionality in FB is possibly already flawed because add agencies employ companies in PH and the likes to actively setup (fake) FB accounts and 'like' pages. It is a problem that FB needs to address. The same was already a problem for click through banners though.

DrBernardo

Well done henkybaby. Do keep trying to explain SM is also for the over 14's...

I thoroughly agree a better SM strategy and presence would be better both for BA and its customers. For us, we'd have an avenue of feedback (let's face it, we don't air every gripe or observation or comment on an aspect of our latest BA experience with them via the webpage or a letter, for fear of being branded nutters or serial complainers - we just post it here instead) and a place to ask quick questions, as well a finding out the latest on a particular situation. And for them, they get free feedback (admittedly with a higher signal to noise ratio than the onboard questionnaire, but arguably faster and more comprehensive), as well as a rapid information dissemination service and advertising channel.

For those that talk about the website, BA's website is painfully slow to use and load on a suboptimal internet connection, is difficult to find information on, and in the case of operational disruption is slow to update with the latest information.

For those who mention email, I'd be delighted, no ecstatic, to have an email address for BA that actually dealt with issues, and didn't give me a moronic time-wasting canned response. A set of Exec Club email addresses that were actually read, actioned and answered by the same team you phone up, for example, would be great. But such a service does not exist.

Neither, as we all know, does a sensible 24/7 telephone service.

And we can't always write straight to Keith Williams, though admittedly that does usually result in speedy and satisfactory resolution of an issue.

So not to say that social media should replace any of those things, or that they shouldn't be improved, but it'd be an additional useful channel.

Personally, I've given up telling BA about anything but the worst screw-ups. It's just too time consuming and, when they reply, frustrating. So they know nothing about little things that I've appreciated or disliked. Not that they care, of course. But they would, or should, care about hearing from 1000 of me about just those things. It's called market research. And they should be able to differentiate between the fanboys saying "what a lovely plane", and a CCR card holder saying "poor service again today at the bar", or "the ads on the IFE are more annoying than ever", or "spent 10 minutes this morning cleaning my seat in First"...

I don't think the Heathrow SM account is a good comparison. None of us is a customer of theirs, which is why they need to fill it with vapid chatter. If they genuinely used it for customer interaction, it'd be full to the brim with info on latest landing charges, and questions from airlines about stand allocation, management of security queues, and lack of snow clearance machines...

What kills this, however, is that IF our esteemed BA chose to expand use of these channels, they would inevitably staff them with the same outsourced characters that had me beating my keyboard in frustration when they didn't bother to read my query or complaint before sending me canned email number 347. So in fact it wouldn't be a bright and shiny service a la KLM, just something else for us to moan about.

(There - d'you all see how I went from all modern and optimistic at the top of that post to bitter and twisted at the bottom? I blame this android keyboard...

colmc

Then again, they could always go down the bmi route, which was...interesting/hilariously bad at times (although they did tend to help reasonably effective when contacted privately!)

layz

The bmi social media team (now disbanded) were quite good at getting things done. They had their own email address and they did a good job of chasing up enquiries with the relevant department.

They also ran competitions to try and increase followers.

They had their faults a lot of misinformation posted (particularly at the beginning - they probably never received much training in the bmi offering) and a lot of drivel but it felt much more informal than the BA offering.

Their Facebook page timeline contains some info on the history of bmi since their formation. They only added the timeline shortly before the BA takeover so perhaps they may have continued to add historical photos to it if the team had been kept around longer.

bmi for me was the only reason I used Twitter for many years. I found that sending them a private message was a good way to use a GUV (gold upgrade voucher) without calling.

henkybaby

Well put. And yes, android will do that to you.

eightblack

Call me old fashioned but when it all goes pear shaped - I want to talk to a human. I don't want to have to poke someone via Facespace or whatever the hell its called. And I certainly don't want to try and explain what happened in 140 characters or less. Or is it 160. I forget. I'm losing the will to live just thinking about it.

With the airline I fly most, I've got all the phone numbers I need in my phone. And those phone numbers are connected to humans who know me and can fix most things. I'm way too impatient to wait for a response via email...

henkybaby

Facebook does not have a limit on the number of characters you can use. I know everyone stubbornly says Twitter but KLM uses mostly Facebook...