The Navigator: With social media, airlines have a new kind of VIP

Owen, who works for a nonprofit organization in Washington, had recently broken her foot, which was in a cast. "I had been on the phone on hold with Virgin America for well over an hour," she remembers. Halfway to the airport, she decided to send Virgin America a tweet — a message on the microblogging service Twitter.

Within minutes, an airline representative messaged her back, offering to help. When she pulled up to the curb, a Virgin America representative greeted her. "Are you @LizOwenLA?" he asked, referring to her Twitter handle. He offered her a seat in a waiting wheelchair, which he'd borrowed from another airline.

When it comes to customer service, no one likes to wait. And new Internet-based technologies that some travel companies are embracing promise an almost instant response, like the one Owen got. If you carry a smartphone, these tools can lead to a better experience during the upcoming holiday travel season — if you know how to use them.

Not every company offers this shortcut to a quicker resolution, and even those with a sophisticated social media presence don't respond as quickly as Virgin reacted to Owen. In that sense, it's very much like any offline transaction: It matters who you are. But instead of presenting your elite frequent-flier memberships for preferred treatment, you need to show that you understand the rules of social media.

Among air carriers, Southwest Airlines and Virgin America have reputations for lightning-fast response to customer service problems noted online. A recent survey by the social media analytics firm Socialbakers found that as an industry, airlines were the second-fastest to reply to customers on sites such as Facebook, with an average response time of 188 minutes. (Telecommunications companies were faster.) Some carriers, such as KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, were significantly faster, replying to customers in less than half an hour.

But simply sending a tweet or posting to a company's Facebook page isn't always enough to get you noticed. "A lot of travel brands want to help," says Twitter spokeswoman Rachael Horwitz. "But you have to look like a real customer."

For starters, you need an account on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter — the three major social media sites — to capture a travel company's attention. But that doesn't guarantee that a company will reply, says Horwitz.

On Twitter, for example, your account comes with a default avatar that looks like an egg. Simply uploading a photo and adding some profile information will set you apart from spammers and ensure that a company knows you're a real person.

That doesn't necessarily mean that you'll get a speedy response. Just as elite-level frequent fliers get preferred treatment, so also do users who have the greatest social clout. Travel companies eye your social media profile, looking for engagement (how active you are online) and the number of your "friends" or "followers." It's possible to instantly measure how important a user is by checking his or her score on Klout, a Web site that measures people's new-media credibility.

Source: http://www.news.theusalinks.com/2012/12/13/the-navigator-with-social-media-airlines-have-a-new-kind-of-vip/