How United isn’t joining up the social media dots

Mar 15, 2011 by Dirk Singer

The other day fellow Rabbit Kate put up a post on the Rabbit site congratulating sandwich chain Pret a Manger on how they responded to a twitter complaint she made.

Kate highlighted the speed of the response, the sincerity of it and the evident internal coordination between whoever was handling their social media feeds and the rest of the company.

Unfortunately not all companies are that progressive, as I saw 1st hand the other day with giant US carrier United Airlines.

If you take a United flight chances are your napkin will have a message printed on it, inviting you to follow them on Twitter. But don’t expect any kind of speedy response if you elect to talk to them rather than the other way around. When I was stuck at Washington’s Dulles Airport the other night after our plane had a fault I tweeted them out several times (the last time that I was writing a blog post).

Among other things I was curious to see what would happen as we have travel clients ourselves at Rabbit.

The answer was nothing.

OK it was 7pm and not every brand has the resources to run an out of hours account, but the merger with Continental will make it into the world’s largest airline and (given different time zones) a 24 hour operation.

But they didn’t reply the next day either. In fact, with 167k followers, United has sent out four tweets in a week. Compare that to JetBlue and Virgin America, held up as the benchmark for effective use of social media among airlines – JetBlue for example has responded to customers 16x in 24 hours.

Between printing the Twitter ID on promotional literature, running the feed and making it part of United’s comms strategy something has obviously gone wrong. Not everyone has the means or inclination to run an account properly, but if you are advertising it to tens of thousands of people every day, it’s definitely important that you’ve moved beyond seeing it as purely a piece of broadcast media