Case Studies | Media Culpa

The travel industry turns to social media

The travel industry is turning to social media in order to build relations with customers and to promote its services. During the eruption of the Icelandic volcano in April, airlines, airports and travel agencies successfully used social media to communicate with travellers. Twitter was one of the channels that many used to update customers about delays and cancelled flights. Companies that tweeted actively quickly gained a large number of new followers, as seen in the presentation below, which would indicate that customers find it useful to follow companies on Twitter.

Hockey stick growth in Twitter followers for airlines & airports

View more presentations from kullin.

Another great social media case from the travel industry is the Twitter application by Lufthansa, called MySkyStatus. The site lets users automatically share flight information via Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, while in the air. The site is now open for travellers on all major airlines and everytime someone uses MySkyStatus they are greeted by the message “Powered by Lufthansa”. It’s a great way to add value to travellers and at the same time expose the brand to thousands of potential customers. To date, the site has distributed more than 400,000 status updates (81,000 on Facebook and 21,000 on Twitter).

Yet another example, soon to launch, is Topguest.com, a site that rewards travellers that frequently check in on hotels and other places using location based services such as Foursquare or Gowalla. According to USA Today and CNET, Topguest has launched a preview version that includes a co-operation with hotel chain Standard. Guests that check in using Topguest get a discount:

Social-media addicts who check into each of Standard’s four hotels in New York, Miami and Los Angeles in the span of one week will earn a free week at any one of the hotels.
You could also check in to Standard establishments – whether restaurants, bars, shops or the hotel spa – 10 times and receive 25% off your reservation.

The Swedish travel agencies Ving and Fritidsresor are actively answering questions from customers on their Facebook pages and they use Twitter to distribute promotions. There are many other good cases from the travel industry, which seems to be one of the industries that are most actively embracing social media. Other companies take note.

Oscar de la Renta to live-stream runway show

Fashion house Oscar de la Renta will live-stream the designer’s runway show online today, Monday at 1 p.m. EST. The designer himself explains why he is taking the show public on the company live-streaming channel.

“Without a doubt, the role of a runway show has changed. In the past, the show was principally for buyers. While they are still a key constituency, we also show for the media. Online media is increasingly influential in fashion. This allows that group and others that can’t attend in person to see things in real time. It’s evolution.”

“A show is the greatest source of brand content that you have, and to be able to share it on such a large scale — it’s really amazing. I think that this is where the real power of the Internet lies, allowing anyone anywhere to interact with your brand, shifting what has traditionally been kept private to the public space. I suppose it’s a bit like adding more seats to the venue.“

The company is active in social media and the corporate Twitter account @OscarPRGirl has more than 7,000 followers. When asked about how social media affects the company and the fashion industry, de la Renta replies:

“The great thing about fashion is that it always looks forward. I would be lying if I said that we understand the complete picture and the long-term effects that social media will have on our company. Right now, we feel strongly that we have to be a part of it. You have to experiment, and our hope is that eventually we will get it right.”

I really like that attitude.

The live-streamed runway show can be viewed here.

How to lose 5,000 inlinks per month and alienate bloggers

If you have been blogging a few years, you may have noticed a change in the way other bloggers react to your content. Back then when I started, in 2004 and 2005, all you had to do is write a witty comment to some news story and five other bloggers would link to your post, possibly adding a few views of their own. Nowadays, you can spend weeks on research for a specific blog post and “all you get back” are a number of retweets, and maybe maybe one or two blog links. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, especially for me who have an old blog with thousands of old links to it, I already have a high page rank. And it’s great that Twitter and Facebook have made it increadibly easy for your thoughts to travel across the web. But it was easier back then to get link love and, since a link is a “vote” on your content in Google, thereby building a good page rank for your blog.

So I will try to more often reward really good blog posts with a link back from my blog, not “only a retweet”.

“Good content deserves more than a retweet.”

Here is a good example that ties in well with the link love theme of this post. Simon Sundén, a great Swedish SEO expert, wrote a story the other day about how one Norwegian daily voluntarily turned down 5,000 natural inlinks per month. In short, Dagbladet.no used to use Twingly to show which blog posts link back to a given article. Since this concept is a win-win for both the paper and the blogger, many Scandinavian news sites have introduced Twingly. The news site gets lots of links and some traffic, while the blogger gets traffic back and some recognition.

What Sundén noticed was that Dagbladet.no stopped using Twingly some time late in 2009 and as you can see from the red columns in the graph below, the effect was that the number of inlinks per month dropped drastically from 5,000-6,000 to a measly 1,000. Meanwhile, competing daily VG.no kept Twingly and has enjoyed a steady level of links from bloggers (see blue columns below).

In the long run, VG.no will probably become a stronger site from a search perspective, compared to Dagbladet.no because bloggers are more likely to link to a similar article on VG.no than on Dagbladet.no.

Image credit: Simon Sundén.

Ultravox Facebook campaign for “Vienna” single failed to reach UK top 40

The 80’s synth band Ultravox is on the road again with their “Return to Eden part II” reunion tour, which will arrive in Stockholm, Sweden on April 28 (yes, I am going). Coinciding with the comeback tour, there has been a campaign to bring the 1981 single “Vienna” to the top of the UK charts. Back in 1981, the single only managed to reach second place, being beaten by Joe Dolce’s “Shaddap you face”. Through Facebook and Twitter, fans have been encouraged to download the song during the week ending April 11, in order to push it back into the charts.

According to the mid-week stats for last week, “Vienna” was just outside the top 100 singles, at #106 and in the end the single did not make it into the top 100. The live album Return to Eden however made it to number 75 in the UK album chart as a new entry.

Although the campaign didn’t reach the goal, it’s fun to see how old bands can use social media to engage with fans and create a buzz around a comeback.

L.A. clubs co-operate on the Social Strip

I had the pleasure of being invited to the Social+Cash conference last week, which focused on how to gain business value through social media. Key note speaker was Chris Heuer, founder of the Social Media Club. One of the things I took away from the day, except meeting up with a lot of good old and new friends, was a case story from Los Angeles. This case was initially presented at SXSW in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

The Social Strip
It’s the story about the three Sunset Strip clubs the Viper Room, the Roxy, and the Comedy Store, that joined forces to drive business via social media channels. The clubs decided in 2009 to leverage the power of their collective network. The L.A. Times Music Blog writes:

“It all started when Roxy owner Nic Adler saw the Viper Room enter the world of Twitter. He virtually and publicly welcomed his competitor to the space by announcing their virtual presence to the thousands of “followers” interacting with the Roxy via Twitter. That simple gesture of goodwill opened the floodgates of camaraderie that has helped the Roxy increase its business by 30% over last year, Adler said, and has helped the Viper Room see its regulars return.”

By using social media channels the clubs managed to revitalize the legendary bar street. For example, visitors that checked in to the Roxy on Foursquare were upgraded to VIP status. Another initiative was the Tweet Crawl, a web 2.0 version of the old pub crawl, described in the video below.

Sunset Strip Tweet Crawl on KTLA from nic adler on Vimeo.

This way of collaborating with competitors is labelled “coopetition” and you can read more about the case in this presentation on thesocialstrip.us. See also The Social Strip on Facebook.

IKEA victim of Facebook hoax

A while back, more than 200,000 Swedes were fooled to join a Facebook group that promised to donate 2 SEK per fan to the victims of the Haiti earth quake. Only problem was that once the group reached the goal, it changed name and added some really outrageous content. I was somewhat amazed that all these people didn’t see through that scam because when something seems too good to be true, it often is.

The latest scam is a Facebook campaign by IKEA that promises to give you a 1,000 USD gift card if you became a fan of the Swedish company. Of course, this is not really a campaign that is really run by IKEA. If you have any knowledge of the IKEA culture I’m convinced that you would agree that IKEA would never give money away in a stunt like this.

IKEA spokesperson Mona Astra Liss says the “false offer” is not some half-baked publicity stunt by IKEA. “It’s absolutely not a publicity stunt and absolutely not endorsed by IKEA,” she says. She adds that Facebook performs closed investigations of scams, so IKEA doesn’t know who’s behind the hoax.

Tags: ikea, facebook, ikea. Ping.