Airline Social Media & The Volcanic Ash Cloud

The following post is a cross-post from SimpliFlying’s blog.  Since the start of the Icelandic Volcanic Ash Cloud crisis I have been working with Shashank Nigam, founder of SimpliFlying, to study the ways in which airlines have utilized social media during the string of travel disruptions. Some leveraging of social media by airlines has been fantastic, some has been horrible … and some totally non-existent.

So without further interruption, here is today’s post from SimpliFlying, that is a mix of my airline social media and crisis communication research and Shashank’s sense of airline social media and marketing.

We all know what happened when the volcano in Iceland erupted and resulted in utter chaos in the aviation world. We also saw how some airlines and aviation authorities around the world struggled to cope with servicing the customers, while others used the latest social media tools to engage and update them.

At SimpliFlying, we saw a paradigm shift in the way airlines handle crises management, in the age of social media. Instead of writing an article on it, we put together an info-graphic, that details the five key steps for managing crises, in the wake of the volcanic eruption.

Please feel free to share it with your colleagues, print it out or use it in your presentations, as long as full credit is given to SimpliFlying.

Special thanks to Steve Frischling for help with the content, and Arno Ghelfi for the design.

Happy Flying

(Click Images Below For High Resolution Printable Files)