Today we kick off what I hope will be a weekly feature here: our guest blogger series. I’ve lined up quite a few guest bloggers in hopes they can give us insight into how they are utilizing social media in their particular industry.
Our first guest blogger is my friend Stephanie Gehman. Stephanie is the Manager of Marketing and Customer Service for Harrisburg International Airport (HIA). I should also point out that she and I met via Social Media and have become great friends. Stephanie has been extremely instrumental in the shape that Inkling Media has taken, and has been an amazing resource for me due to her knowledge of social media and assistance in consulting on everything from our website to the services we offer. I also think Stephanie has done a great job utilizing social media in unique ways for an entity that one might not think about in terms of social media, which is why I invited her to kick off our Guest Blog series.
Taking Flight: What Social Media has Done for HIA
We jumped on board the social media surge in mid-2008 with a Facebook profile and the fly HIA blog. Since then Harrisburg International Airport (HIA) has expanded the profile into a business Fan Page, regularly tweets, photo shares on Flickr, opened the HIA Observation Deck for the aviation geek in all of us, and maintains a LinkedIn special interest group. Combined these social media platforms have introduced us more routinely and intimately to the needs of several thousand of our users. The benefits of these platforms are both direct and indirect.
- It afforded us the opportunity to build relationships:
Approximately 3000 passengers go through our facility each day, but we don’t know most of them beyond that statistical label. However, through social media we are now able to communicate with these people in a real-time manner and even have the opportunity to occasionally meet them when they’re in the building departing for a flight.
- It extended the reach of our Customer Service department: Social media has added another facet of response to our Customer Service efforts. While we are not in control of what happens in relation to air travel, we do have control over the brick and mortar facilities that our users experience when entering the airport. If someone tweets a complaint or concern regarding a service we provide, or even a service provided by one of our vendors or airline partners, we will respond as quickly as we can. We cannot always directly fix the issue, but social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, are means to efficiently acknowledge a problem and let the customer know that you want to help remedy that which warranted their public post or tweet.
- Increased the efficiency of sharing airport-related condition reports: We can, with great efficiency send out reports related to weather, delay, and roadway conditions. If a wintry mix is in the forecast for HIA, we use social media as a means to remind travelers to check their flight status; and we also use our blog in these instances to remind people of how to travel safely when winter weather is a concern. Another example of condition reporting efficiency relates to the ongoing roadway construction (May through October 2009) by PennDOT on the Airport Connector Road off of route 283. We used Twitter heavily to remind folks about the construction and also about changes to the traffic patterns. These various types of conditions reports are often re-tweeted by the local & regional news outlets, which expands the reach of our original message.
- Facilitated conversations with worldwide industry professionals: There is a population of travel and aviation professionals that are actively social networking on the various platforms. These folks have a wealth of knowledge and insight on aspects of aviation and travel that can benefit not only their followers/friends, but ours as well. These professionals offer travel tips, destination and attraction reviews, updates on airline business practices and information that would require a whole other blog post to thoroughly describe. Social media is global and should be accessible to just about everyone. We’ve re-tweeted or re-posted the content of professionals from across to globe, as well as those folks right in our backyard. The interactions with these professional are not limited to merely a recycling of their content, but also includes the ability to hold conversation with them. There are intelligent people on the other side of those tweets and posts, and many of them are happy to answer questions or share their insight or opinion on activity transpiring in the industry. It’s like having a worldwide peer group that can bring new perspective to a topic that you personally didn’t hold or consider.
- Gave us a new way to market our brand and our partners: We have been able to extend the message of our brand platform to our audience for very little cost, outside of the time invested to do so, through social media sites. We will continue to utilize traditional means of advertising: print, radio, outdoor, etc. However, we can take the message of those efforts to social networking and engage our followers/friends in dialogue about that message. It’s great to get feedback on the perception of our brand and our partners. The, at times, raw and honest comments resulting from conversing about our brand, has shaped the direction by which we move forward in future campaigns.
- Amplified the reach of and visits to our web site: Now that Google and Bing are including tweets in their organic search engine results, HIA has the ability to appear more frequently and steadily in a host of categorical searches we may not have appeared in before. We generate content on topics ranging from current events to travel trends to hot button aviation issues, in addition to content related directly to the business operations of HIA. We have increased traffic to our site based on a variety of key word searches as a result of our social networking. Traffic has also increased by social media referral sources due to us including links in our content that push users back to our site for more thorough information. Users are also creating content that includes links to our site from their posts, status updates, tweets and blogs.
I could detail a number of other benefits that HIA has reaped from social media, but all-in all, the common theme is that of community building and having conversations with those audiences that have a vested interest in the airport, and the airlines and vendors operating at HIA. All of these benefits build off of and are directly related to engaging with users in dialogue instead of the monologue that results from traditional means of marketing and advertising.
Don’t miss out on the interactive and real-time value and complement that social media can be to your traditional advertising and marketing strategy. And more importantly, don’t miss out on the opportunity to engage and converse with that core group of supporters who are willing to routinely purchase your product or service and recommend your business to others.
Stephanie has offered us a lot of really good insights here. How are you utilizing social media to help your business? Is there anything offered here that you can use in your particular industry?
