Social Media on Crisis Communications: Europe air space closure

[Philip Weiss]

Yesterday I just landed in Vienna after being stranded in Bangkok since Friday - experiencing along with millions of other passengers the joys of our new found Icelandic volcano. It is, and has been, a fascinating story and there will be a great deal of learning to be dealt with about how people, organizations and groups communicate in times of crisis. Just to give a few examples, some organizations such as Eurocontrol, have been doing an impressive job at keeping everyone informed by Twitter. As someone who is in real need of up to date information, I must admit that we can really appreciate the effort made:. My understanding is that Aurelie (member of the IABC group) is involved / behind this effort so it would be great to connect with her after this is over.

On the other hand, it seems that most airlines are doing a disastrous job at keeping their passengers informed about the situation. I am myself flying with Austrian Airlines and they have been slow and unresponsive in communicating. So in the spirit of engaged online communication, I have formed a passenger group in the hotel where I am staying in Bangkok and they started to post information about developments on a facebook group we created for the occasion: Facebook: Austrian Passengers in Bangkok

Although we only have 27 people from the flight on the group it is the main place to get the latest news from the airline and the manager of Austrian airlines is relying on us to disseminate information to passengers in an effective way. What makes this even more ironic is that Austrian Airlines has a facebook 'fan page' which is, in the spirit of the Nestlé 'social media suicide' turning into a forum for people with complaints against them.

What makes this worse is that the local manager told us that they are not allowed to go on Facebook as part of their company policy so neither he nor anyone else is able to respond to a group of frustrated passengers.

More on this when (?) I return.

Cross post from Hyperthinker.eu

[Simon Blackley]

Philip, Mathew, Aurélie,

We all have a lot to learn from this. What interests me in particular is the challenge of getting support (authorisation) for setting up and delivering this kind of service in an institutional setting - and the reputational cost of failing to do so. This cost must be mounting very fast, just as it is in the private sector.

Perhaps we can invite Aurélie as a guest speaker at a future Web2EU evening? ESN would be happy to sponsor it.

[Mathew Lowry]

I, like many people, promoted Aurelie's work via Twitter, as it was just so useful to travellers, as well as being particularly interesting to everyone interested in the use of social media.

I'm currently listening to For Immediate Release, which I've been following since FIR's co-host, Neville Hobson, spoke at our IABC/web2eu launch event on May last year, organised by Hugh.

After over 5 years and 500 episodes, they have just gone from a bi-weekly to a weekly format, so they spend quite a bit of time talking about that in their latest edition. But then, around 24 minutes in, they start discussing the use of social media in the ashcloud.

And here I'm typing as I listen:
- the #ashcloud tag was seeing 4-5 tweets / second;
- self-organised online support initiatives included Facebook pages like Phillip's and stand-alone sites;
- self-help actions - e.g., people piloting powerboats across the English Channel to pick up people (and being prevented by French border police!);
- the use of the UK's Royal Navy to pick up people (communicated via Twitter);
- Gartner blogged a comparison of 2 airlines' use of social media: KLM did great and were impressive, Air France were rubbish (those French again! ;-))… Note that they're the same company!!
- the ashcloud, inevitably, has its own twitter account:

Check it all out - very interesting. I suspect we'll be seeing this particular case study analysed a lot, and Eurocontrol's work being cited many times as well.

PS And my experience? Well, I took the train to a business meeting in the Netherlands on the day planes were first grounded. You'd think I'd have had no problems! But no … of the 4 trains I took that day, 2 broke down! And it was full of people trying to find a way home from Schipol. It never rains but it pours …

[Philip Weiss]

Hi Aurelie,

Thank you for all the hard work you have been doing keeping the public informed. I'd be very interested in setting something up to discuss learning from the crisis in the coming week or so. I have been looking at what airlines did (or didn't do) on social media and I think this is a topic that will be of great interest to many communicators. Let's touch base next week (I am flying off to Shangai on Saturday - so I hope I will be back shortly after), and organize something.

Phil

[Aurelie Valtat]

Hi Philip,

Glad to hear you are back safe from Bangkok!

Yes indeed EUROCONTROL has done a great deal of work on informing the general public, aviation professionals and the media via Twitter and Facebook and it would be interesting to share that experience as soon as all this is over. Let's stay in touch and see if this topic could be of interest for other IABC members, in particular those working in or with public institutions.

All the best,
Aurelie