Case study: Finnair puts social media community to work
Jul 10th
By {grow} Community Member Ana Silva O’Reilly
One day last year I received an email with quite the provocative title: “How can you improve air travel?” At first, I thought it was a joke, but the sender seemed reputable — Finland’s flagship air carrier, Finnair and the Helsinki Airport. They were launching a worldwide search for airline best practices called Quality Hunters.
The application form wasn’t complicated, and it encouraged you to share your best airline and airport experience in one of several categories — business class, shopping, food, airports, entertainment, and socialising. The seven people with the best ideas would win a seven week journey around the world to find the best travel ideas on earth! This sounded like my kind of fun!
Stupidly, I never realised that votes for your idea were key for selection and with only one day to go in the contest, I still managed to get in the top 10. A good effort, but not good enough to be selected. I was actually disappointed.
The birth of a community
The airline’s “Quality Hunters” project had a blog (qualityhunters2.com) and a Twitter account (@qualityhunters), and a vibrant social media community actually began to form around this key idea of improving air travel. Participants were invited to attend online chats about a variety of travel-related topics. Such chats could last all day and were attended by hundreds of people!
Even though we had not won the prize, the team behind the Twitter account was determined to keep all of us connected to the project by tweeting the adventures of those lucky seven winners.
Of course this was quite compelling Twitter content — it was great to know where they were, what they were up to and so on. But what kept me interested were the daily twitter chats and knowing that we could still suggest topics for improvement. The Twitter chats covered everything from cocktails, to airline alliances. After a while, strong connections and friendships began to form in this community.
A week before the epic seven week journey was scheduled to end, the community received a surprise – an eighth Quality Hunter was to be selected, to join this adventure for the last week, and the winner was going to be chosen by the community! This time around, I wasn’t disappointed because one of my new Twitter community friends, @arjantupan, was selected.
A return on the social media investment
When they returned from their trip, the hard work began. The Quality Hunters submitted their best ideas to the judging panel (made up by Finnair and Helsinki Airport execs) and the most feasible ones were shared with the entire QH community.
One of the easiest ideas to implement was an airport Book Swap lounge. Simple, straight to the point, and obviously useful. Using Pinterest, we were encouraged to submit design and branding ideas and it was incredible to see how many of us, almost six months later, were still interested. I certainly was. My suggestion was that each book should have a sticker sharing the Quality Hunters story and allow those using the book swap lounge to record where each book has traveled. Here is a picture of how my idea was implemented:
It was nice to be recognized by the airline but being part of this company’s social network meant more to me than they would ever know. You see, by participating, I was constantly encouraged and inspired to start my own travel blog and create my online alter-ego @mrsoaroundworld. I made some valuable business connections and authentic friendships. The people in the Quality Hunters community were the first ones to read my new blog and spread the word. It rapidly became a very popular site for tales of luxury travel.
Finnair’s social media effort was effective, helpful and sincere. It was a win-win for the company, the Quality Hunter community, and certainly any one traveling through the Helsinki Airport.
And I have to admit … every time I walk past a Finnair check-in desk … I smile. I am even thinking about a trip to Finland. After all, I really have to see that book-swap lounge, right?
What do you think about this case study?
Ana Silva O’Reilly is UK-based social media enthusiast and luxury travel blogger. Follow her on Twitter at @mrsoaroundworld.
Maybe using LESS social media is the path to online success
May 30th
By Srinivas Rao, Contributing {grow} Columnist
Earlier this year as I was transitioning through phases of the blogger’s evolution and making the shift to entrepreneur, I decided to make a Twitter list of some of the most successful people online so I could study them It’s an incredibly eye opening exercise that I recommend to anybody. What shocked me was to learn how little time some of the biggest names online were actually spending on social media. Here are a few of the lessons I learned:
Creating Lasting Value
Every tweet, status update and moment of brilliance you have on any social media platform has a shelf life of about an hour. Nobody is going to dig through the archives of your tweets and Facebook updates. This approach to social media is the path of least resistance. To make matters worse, you’re creating content on somebody else’s platform and not getting paid for it.
To make an impact on your business, community or tribe, it’s essential to create things that have lasting value.
- Blog Posts: When compared to a tweet or status update, a blog post has a significantly longer shelf life. Not only will it have a more powerful impact immediately upon creating it, but it has potential to be found in your archives years later.
- Books: While blog posts are great, it’s easy to get on a hamster wheel and create content without a purpose. To add to that not everybody will dig through several years of archived content. A book gives you an opportunity to expose a reader to your entire body of work. Mark Schaefer could write a series of amazing posts about how to use Twitter. But a book like the Tao of Twitter will have a much bigger impact in the long run.
- Videos/Podcasts: Podcasts, videos and any other sort of multimedia content arguably take a longer time to create than written content. But the shelf life is fantastic, and the potential to repurpose it can make it a goldmine of value for your business and your customers.
Self Promotion is a Necessity
Self promotion gets a bad rap on the social web, but I think we have be to careful not to dismiss how essential it is to the sustainability of a real business. Free content is not going to keep your lights on or put food on the table. To make money you have to sell.
The typical launch sequence of most bloggers is to spend months working on a book, course or information product of some sort. It’s followed by an aggressive promotional effort that lasts a week or two, and most of the revenue is generated in those first few weeks. After that sales come in, but sporadically. There’s nothing wrong with having an ongoing promotion strategy for the work that gets you paid:
- If you have a product, eBook or course that you created a while back, schedule a tweet once or twice a week letting people know about it.
- If you have an email newsletter, don’t be afraid to let the people on your list know about your services and products on a regular basis. If you lose subscribers, don’t sweat it. You’re running a business not a charity.
The biggest brands continually make you aware of their products with one primary goal: to generate more sales.
Having an End Game
Do a search for any social media advice and what you’ll find is an endless stream of articles about how to increase your traffic, how to get more fans/followers, or how to write better content. But what nobody spends enough time talking about is the end game. What’s the ultimate goal of your social media efforts? If you have no idea why you’re doing something, there’s a high likelihood that you’re wasting your time.
If you’re not careful social media can become a giant time suck that has little impact on your business. Are you so consumed by social media that you’ve started to confuse activity with accomplishment?
Srinivas Rao writes about the things you should have learned in school, but never did and his the host-co founder of BlogcastFM. You can follow him on twitter @skooloflife
Mobile Marketing — Old School! (video)
Feb 25th
This is a fun and fascinating case study. How do you use social media when your business keeps moving around from street to street? This shows how the Good Food Truck of Atlanta, GA is building a movement of passionate fans … even when they’re literally mobile!
Many thanks to Glenn Taylor and the wonderful folks from MLT Creative for piecing this together for me!
Case study: Social Media Makes Big Splash for Small Entrepreneur
Dec 19th
Here is the most colorful social media success story you’ll ever read!
The story starts with paint. Colorful … get it? I crack myself up.
My friend Julie Boney became tired of painting splotches all over her walls every time she wanted to re-decorate. So she invented a product called “Small Wall” that allows decorators to paint a small board and then post it on a wall like a post-it note. It’s easy and won’t harm the walls.
To market her clever invention, Julie sensed social media might help but needed direction. She decided her primary objective was brand awareness so I walked her through some fundamental strategies.
The first step was finding meaningful, targeted followers on the social web — people and publications who would be interested in her idea. That way, she would be delivering content and building relationships with people who mattered, people who would love her story. We also talked about strategies for engaging with these audiences in a helpful and authentic way.
One targeted publication was Woman’s Day magazine, which features lots of home-oriented tips. After Woman’s Day published an article about “try before you buy,” Julie commented on their Facebook page, suggesting that her Small Wall invention was an excellent solution to the problem of selecting paint colors. Within an hour, she had a response from the magazine’s editor-in-chief Elizabeth Mayhew, asking for samples!
In October, the Nashville-based Small Wall was featured prominently in a Woman’s Day Online decorating feature (see graphic above) and in the January 2011 print edition, Small Wall is once again the star of an article on decorating tips for the new year.
“This is exposure we never could have afforded through traditional advertising methods,” Julie said. “It made me a believer in the power of the social web for small businesses.”
And Julie’s success is just beginning. A Facebook connection also resulted in the product being discussed on a Martha Stewart broadcast and now Martha is following her on Twitter (Martha follows less than 1%of her followers)
Publicity like this has been helpful introducing Small Wall with zero expenditures and pulling through sales at Sherwin-Williams, Ace Hardware and Amazon.com.
A key lesson is that both print and online publications have an insatiable hunger for content and are scouring the social web for ideas, connections, experts, angles and quotes. But you can’t take advantage of this opportunity if you’re invisible or not actively connecting and engaging.
The social web can be a great equalizer for small businesses if you apply a little know-how, creativity and content!
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