Why are communication strategies still behind the social media times when a crisis hits?
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.
