Qantas slammed for bad social media service during shutdown
While many airlines are great on social media, with Delta, KLM and British Airways all scoring well others are terrible. Qantas proved itself a case in point at the weekend after it grounded all flights in its dispute with staff.
As customers turned to social media to find out what was going on they weren’t getting much out of the airline’s official channels which were attacked for being corporate and wooden.
You get that wooden thing straight away with the tweet that announced the lockout:
“From 8pm AEDT on 31/10 Qantas will lock out all employees who will be covered by the new ALAEA, TWU and AIPA agreements,” read the wooden Qantas tweet announcing the debacle.
It is as Qantas is on Twitter and using social media, but really has no idea what it is for. That’s a PR disaster as it comes at a time when there is a massive increase in the number of people tweeting at airlines.
We saw that in the UK back in February when snow caused Virgin and BA to ground flights, but both upped their Twitter game in response as people flocked to their accounts for flight information.
While as the SMH put it tweets from Qantas appeared “to lack empathy” for the plight of many customers whose travel plans were thrown into chaos. A total fail:
“Qantas will reimburse the difference between the cost of the new ticket (in same cabin of travel) and value of the refunded Qantas ticket,” read another tweet.
A chart showing spike in weekend tweets
The lack of proper response, and failure to really engage, on Twitter and other social channels led quickly to several fake Qantas Twitter accounts springing up ridiculing the airline and its CEO, Alan Joyce, including @AlanJoyceCEO and @Qantas_VH_OQA. That’s people taking advantage of bad communications and making companies pay. You would think that an Aussie airline would be better, but no.
“I’d completely agree that the Qantas Twitter account sounds like it’s read from a script and is very mechanical. It’s a shame because Qantas has some very good people who would be great at talking to their customers on Twitter, but they’ve been gagged by senior Qantas people who don’t understand how to make the best use of Twitter yet,” said an executive with a leading digital marketing agency who anonymously to the SMH.
This isn’t even the first time that Qantas has been tested and found wanting in a crisis. Last November the emergency landing of a Qantas Airbus A380 at Changi Airport in Singapore also showed it to be wanting.
The situation was so chaotic in the initial hours after the incident that Qantas officials were supposedly telling Australia media that no wreckage was found on the small Indonesian island of Batam despite a pretty incriminating photo spreading around the web.
Some of those wooden Qantas tweets
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It’s good.
Here at http://eezeer.com/datalab/airline-monthly-report we are discussing the same issue of Airlines on Twitter. A classic example of the powerful force of Social Media was displayed during the month of September with Southwest, Air Asia and their respective passengers and Twitter accounts.
Both Airlines received huge attention from a spike in Tweet Traffic but for rather different reasons. Southwest received unwanted bad publicity from the Leisha Hailey saga. We found that this was a #Fail: as 84% of their total Tweets received by passengers were negative and this Tweet spike took place over 3 days! On the flipside, we found that Air Asia benefitted positively through increased Tweet traffic from contests they ran and good news. We found that this was a #BigUp: as September’s massive sales promotion event equaled to a 1/3 of all tweets sent to them.
Looking at the way in which Qantas has dealt with their passengers over issues that have arisen within their company, it seems as if they are still venturing into the personal, NOW, realm of Twitter. This is still a foreign environment for some Airlines and takes some time adjusting from the sometimes cold nature of the corporate environment in which they are used to.
During the month of October Qantas received nearly 17 000 public Tweets from their passengers. This number in itself is enough to warrant the investment of efficient, personal service into Social Media, and in particular, Twitter.
Here at eezeer.com/datalab we are discussing the same issue of Airlines on Twitter. A classic example of the powerful force of Social Media was displayed during the month of September with Southwest, Air Asia and their respective passengers and Twitter accounts.
Both Airlines received huge attention from a spike in Tweet Traffic but for rather different reasons. Southwest received unwanted bad publicity from the Leisha Hailey saga. We found that this was a #Fail: as 84% of their total Tweets received by passengers were negative and this Tweet spike took place over 3 days! On the flipside, we found that Air Asia benefitted positively through increased Tweet traffic from contests they ran and good news. We found that this was a #BigUp: as September’s massive sales promotion event equaled to a 1/3 of all tweets sent to them.
Looking at the way in which Qantas has dealt with their passengers over issues that have arisen within their company, it seems as if they are still venturing into the personal, NOW, realm of Twitter. This is still a foreign environment for some Airlines and takes some time adjusting from the sometimes cold nature of the corporate environment in which they are used to.
During the month of October Qantas received nearly 17 000 public Tweets from their passengers. This number in itself is enough to warrant the investment of efficient, personal service into Social Media, and in particular, Twitter.
[...] UK marketing site The Wall has been sticking the knife in on QF's use of social media during the disruption: Qantas slammed for bad social media service during shutdown [...]
[...] Het publiek was deze week wederom niet te spreken over Qantas, slechts enkele weken na de slechte social media service tijdens de stakingen. Dit keer ging het om de #QantasLuxury campagne die de PR afdeling heeft [...]