Social media is a great way to keep in touch with clients. As Clare wrote, Facebook and Twitter offer chances for airlines (and not only) to hear from customers. They facilitate two-way communication (so much desired in theory but not so much applied in practice, until now) instead of one-way flow. Whereas newsletters were a widespread practice to keep clients updated on news and special offers without receiving any feedback, with tweets customers can now learn about news and sales while also expressing their views on the subject.
British Airways uses online media for both client and media relations. The airline has two Twitter accounts to communicate with customers (one for the US and one for the UK), with over 35,000 followers (not a very high number but still). I will however not describe BA’s social media efforts but rather focus on their online media relations, particularly in Romania. Sending press releases, handling media inquiries and managing interviews via e-mail are part of the day-to-day job of any PR professional. But online press conferences are not…
British Airways was the first airline (and company) in Romania to organize an online press conference. Such approaches are not so unusual now, but they used to be in 2007. I find the concept appropriate given the fact that the press conference was announcing the launch of the ba.com portal in Romania.
The conference
The BA online conference had the parts of any regular press meeting: welcome message, CEO speech and Q&A session. The venue was however virtual. Instead of registering at the welcome desk, journalists received a user name and a password in order to log onto the portal especially created for the event. It comes as no surprise that the media kit was available in electronic format.
The results
It generated important coverage, reading on both the launch of the ba.com website and the online conference itself. Journalists were enthusiastic about the idea and considered it was an original one. According to them the online conference was time saving. It was also a great opportunity for media representatives to participate at the event, as it would have been otherwise impossible because of the busy schedule.
As technology is evolving, stakeholders relations are changing too. We have learned few of the benefits online media brings in the relation with the customers and the media. By mixing some elements of social media and online media relations we get a new type of press conference. I will write about it in a future post. Clue: it is blue :)
Picture: Qsrmagazine
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Interesting post! We have a class presentation in a couple of weeks on 'the social media newsroom' so your BA example is really helpfull!
ReplyDeleteUntill recently I had not heard much about online press releases and conferences, despite having studied journalism previously, so it seems to be a relitively new development.
By being time efficient and allowing more participation of journalists it appears to be a clever use of online communication that will maximise coverage for the organisation concerned. Definitely something for more PR practitioners to become engaged with!
For sure! Online media provides great opportunities for media relations. I actually read the trend is to carry out interviews on Facebook, which I find really interesting.
ReplyDeleteIt comes as no suprise that BBC sent its journos to social media training :)