Interlaken – Within minutes of the announcement by the European Regions Airline Associatin (ERA) that airBaltic was named the organization’s airline of the year, the news was being spread to the more than 10,000 subscribers to the airline’s social networking site. The Airline of the Year/10 Gold Award was a first for the airline.

While it was announced at the ERA General Assembly in Interlaken, Switzerland, the news illustrated how airlines can use social networking to their own ends. Interestingly, European regional carriers seem to be further ahead than U.S. mainline carriers given American’s announcement this week that it was finally launching its own social networking.

Social networks on the World Wide Web are booming and every day more and more people connect. Facebook, Twitter, Xing, and many other social networks connect people around the world and on a single platform.

Tero Taskila, airBaltic’s chief commercial officer, said the airline has just fewer than 5,000 followers on their Twitter page and more than 5,000 friends on the Facebook site. A promotional video, incorporating the event will be uploaded on YouTube. He told delegates at the General Assembly this morning the networking sites were used for different reasons but were successful at raising the profile of the airline that has reinvented itself twice in recent years. Begun as a national flag-carrier in the mid-1990s airBaltic was morphed into a low-cost airline in the early 2000s and, finally, to a hub and spoke airline with low fares in the past 18 months.

“It has been remarkably cost effective,” said Taskila, “We spent a lot of time creating a strategy to map out what we wanted to achieve from these websites. We realized very quickly we have to be informal on the sites. It’s like a barbeque party and not corporate speech. Twitter helps us spread news around the world very quickly. As soon as it was announced we had won the gold award a message was sent to all our followers.

“Facebook is like a beehive, it attracts people to the page,” he continued. “They don’t have to buy anything but the information they give us is very useful. YouTube is the most popular entertainment channel at present and we don’t use it to interact with customers but because it is owned by Google the hits generated on YouTube helps raise our profile on Google.”

Just one person is employed to maintain the three sites and even then he spends only a third of his time on the work Taskila said. “Our initial investment was just €500 and it has grown from there. We invested some effort into marketing the sites to get some momentum going. We ask questions of users and we ask for their feedback on their experiences on their flights. We have competitions and the prizes are free flights. We hold promotions where friends and followers get a special code for reductions on ticket prices. These codes are only available on the site and nowhere else. This work has made us the third largest airline on Twitter in Europe behind British Airways and Lufthansa and 12th in the world. The biggest airline on Twitter is JetBlue with 1.3 million followers so we have some way to go but we are punching above our weight.”

Delegates generally expressed warm interest in the ideas put forward by Taskila but there was also caution.
One delegate said: “Its proved to useful for our airline because we connect with people we would not normally attract but we cannot lose sight of the fact that we must put as much effort into other ways of marketing our services.”

Taskila agreed. “Can any airline not afford to be offline on social networking sites when you look at the numbers we have obtained for so little outlay and effort,” he said. “We have a conversion rate of about 5% on Facebook and about 2% on Twitter. These figures appear small but they are significant in an era when every little helps.”

The globalization of news coverage of accidents and serious incidents is a growing concern with ERA delegates. Sean Gates, a senior partner with London-based lawyers Gates and Partners, said social networking sites spread the news faster than traditional news venues. “It was incredible that the first pictures of the US Airways Airbus that force landed in the Hudson River earlier this year were uploaded to Twitter within 60 seconds of the aircraft landing,” he said. “Such incidents can spark a media frenzy and internet chat rooms and forums fuel the matter further. Rolling news channels create armchair experts who comment on incidents that have just occurred and on which detail is very sketchy.”

Gates said airlines need to use all channels available to channel news to media and other sources to “get their story across”. These channels include the use of online social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook as well as more traditional wire releases and messages posted on websites and e-mailed to regular travelers.

“Airlines, and airports, must take the initiative to ensure a fair balance,” he warned. “With the criminalization of so many air accidents these days it is important to ensure this happens as quickly as possible. To do so quickly during an emergency means the planning will have to be done now.”