Simple question: why can’t the UK deal with snow?! Or rather why, as BAA owner of Heathrow Airport have demonstrated this week, is snow an online PR disaster waiting to happen.

Whilst the snow has had an adverse affect on trains, buses and cars, there has been acute misery at London’s Heathrow, with over 2,000 arrivals and departures cancelled in the run up to Christmas.

BAA has dropped the ball. Big time.

BAA has coped with the current weather crisis in an old school, pre-social media kind of way. The majority of passengers aren’t complaining that their flights haven’t been able to take off. You’ll find that most of them don’t mind the wait in the interest of safety. What most passengers are complaining about is the serious lack of information and communication.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. So what could BAA have done differently?

1. Snow Desk

There could and should have been a dedicated “snow desk” that kept in contact with the airlines, the ground team and air traffic control. This team could then have fed information to their online and social media teams to publish, as well as Sky and the BBC. Having the snow desk in place would have cost a fraction of what BAA lost in bad PR coverage.

2. Heathrow Website

The latest snow crisis hit on Saturday (18th), yet it wasn’t until Monday (20th) that the primary Heathrow Airport website was updated. Up until then it was displaying an ad for holiday car parking. Finally, on Monday, a static message panel was added with a generic message about contacting your airline before travelling. There were no real-time updates, only general updates every few hours.

This only demonstrated that BAA value their website as a sales tool, not as a communication channel. The Snow Desk could take over the website and turn it into a communication hub, linking to the official Twitter feed, linking to the Met Office weather website, as well as the major broadcasters.

3. Free Wifi at the Airport

With no information at the airport many passengers used their smartphones to try and find out what was going on, only to discover that mobile networks where swamped. The simple answer would be to increase the number of Wifi points which could be charged at a normal rate at any other time of the year, but free in times of crisis. Such a simple thing would make people feel more warm and fuzzy towards BAA.

4. Make Twitter and Facebook Social

Twitter and Facebook are Social Media, not broadcast media. BAA have managed to update their Twitter feed, but it needs to be integrated with their website, and be more helpful.
BAA doesn’t have a Facebook page, and has even stopped people from uploading photos of the travel chaos to Facebook, having had some photos already picked up and used by some of the news networks, further fuelling the fire and causing negative feelings towards BAA.
A well-managed Social strategy could have worked in BAA’s favour. If they worked with passengers, they could have encouraged positive Tweets and Facebook messages. The cost would have been free food, water and helpful staff.

5. Use Search

A well thought out online strategy should involve creating timely stories and working to make them appear in both the organic and paid search results. This would have made BAA look proactive, but instead it was individual airlines that had to do this, albeit hampered by the lack of information from BAA.

Salt!

To rub salt into the wound, the BBC posted a story about Helsinki airport that went viral on Twitter and Facebook. Helsinki airport had six feet of snow last winter but did not have to close. The last time it was forced to close because of the weather was in 2003 and then only for half an hour!

The snow is a wake up call for all companies. Your customers are connected, new media feeds old media and bad PR can be devastating.

I have found three key tools that will help you better understand your audience. They mix both quantitative and qualitative data to give you a much more in-depth view of your online visitors.

1. Social Media Monitoring: Social Mention

Social Media Monitoring allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, and your products across social media sites, web-wide. It can help brands with quality control or customer care problems that may have gone unnoticed.

With Social Mention you can see your top social media keywords (useful for SEO and PPC, the latest comments about you or your business, and identify any negative feelings towards you or your brand.

For example, you might have noticed that you are getting less traffic to your site from your brand terms. Social Mention could show you if you’ve had a negative message on a social media site or blog, which you could then attribute that drop in traffic to.

2. Feedback Tool: Kampyle

Kampyle is a fantastic tool that gives you invaluable insights into your online customers. It allows your online visitors to give you feedback on your business, and can even be integrated with Google Analytics.

The Israeli start-up claims that small sites average one to five feedback messages per day, medium sites average 20-30, and large sites average upwards of 50. Kampyle presents the most value to the large sites, which must manage their feedback effectively or lose out to their competitors who are doing this better.

A clever Greasemonkey script even allows you to merge your Kampyle feedback with your Google Analytics data. This gives you invaluable context and often leads to the discovery of problems with web page design.

3. Heat Maps: ClickTale

ClickTale is probably best described as visual Analytics. ClickTale heatmaps allow you to see where your users not only clicked, but also where their mouse went. Even cleverer is the ability to record an individual’s user journey. You can even see how much attention a specific area of a web page gets from your visitors.

ClickTale can be most valuable when you want to see how individual users actually use your website. If you are doing any kind of website testing, my advice would be to try ClickTale first – it will give you an invaluable insight into what is and isn’t currently working.

Using these tools together with Google Analytics will give you a much better, deeper understanding of your customers: Social Mention gives you access to the conversations going on outside of your website, Kampyle allows you to gain insights into what your customers actually think through feedback, and ClickTale can actually show you what your visitors are doing on your website.

Have you got any favourite insights tools that you use with in conjunction with Google Analytics? Share them with us…