Qantas: The ‘Unliking’ of an Australian Icon

Oct
2011
31

posted by | on Announcement, Australia, Facebook, News, Small Business, Social Media Strategy, Statistics, Twitter, Uncategorized | 13 comments

Breaking News: Qantas Fleet Grounded

Breaking News: Qantas Fleet Grounded

The last 48 hours in Australia has seen a social media storm unlike anything this country has seen before. It may just be the ‘Unliking of Qantas’.

This article is not an opinion piece on the Qantas grounding or industrial action, nor on how the company, Alan Joyce (CEO) or unions have handled the situation. It came about as I happened to be sitting at home on Saturday night when the news broke. Being a social media geek, I spent the next 8 hours glued to the computer screen watching Twitter Feeds and Facebook posts scroll past me faster than horses at the Melbourne Cup!

This article aims to look at how Qantas handled the social media in the first 36 hours and shares some lessons that we might all learn from.

First…..watch this video. It shows the screen grabs, videos and posts to give a snap shot of how it unfolded. It also contains the key lessons!

If you can tell me where the background music is from – you’ll get a free hard copy of our social media book
“Social Media aLIVE!: 33 Hot Social Media Tips“.

The key takeaways so far…… There will be more as this unfolds in the coming days and weeks, but there is much to learn already!

1. Resources on Standby: If you know news is going to break or you have controversial news in the public domain – ensure that you have staff on standby or available to deal with the public comments, questions and concerns.

2. Provide information: one of the biggest complaints from consumers over the past 2 days was that there was just no information coming through. If your company does something that is unpopular or a controversy breaks out around your brand, keep consumers informed. It may seem like small pieces of information to you who is in the middle of it, but to someone who’s life is being inconvenienced, every little bit of information helps.

3. Respond to comments: There is no need to respond to abusive comments unless you have something useful to say to the person. However, often in these situations, where there are large volumes of posts, those with legitimate questions or concerns can go unanswered or ignored. This only serves to upset people further and what started out as a simple question, may degenerate into frustration and abuse. Qantas only started responding to people at 10am this morning (Monday 31st October). In that time hundreds of thousands of comments had gone unanswered. It wouldn’t have been possible to respond to them all, however the general sentiment would have been less vitriolic if it appeared that someone was responding to the outcry….or outrage!

4. Don’t delete comments:there are very few scenarios where I think it is a good idea to delete comments.

If 'Everyone (most recent) isn't selected you will only see Qantas posts

If 'Everyone (Most recent) isn't selected you will only see Qantas posts

One consistent theme on Facebook was that people were posting the same post over and over again as they believed that their comments were being deleted. It could be that their settings were such that they were only viewing the comments by Qantas and had they clicked on ‘Everyone (Most recent) they would have seen that their post was there numerous times. I can’t say either way whether Qantas was deleting posts as the volume of posts was so high. I have met someone from Qantas in social media and would be very surprised if they took that approach. But I could be wrong!

Why not to delete? If you delete a persons post, they are very likely to find another platform or avenue to vent their frustration. In some cases this could be far worse than it happening on a platform where you hare able to engage in the dialogue and potentially answer their concern or deal with their agitation. I’m not sure this would have been possible with Qantas given the sheer volume, however saying nothing or deleting posts will only upset people further.

5. Set Profanity settings on high: having consumers swearing on your page can be highly insulting to other visitors and can reflect poorly on your brand, even if you didn’t post it. Facebook has a setting in the Edit Page section where you can set the profanity level to high and also ban certain words. Even I was shocked at some of the abusive language being used on the Qantas Facebook page and this could have been avoided.

Have you had any other social media learnings? It’s a shame so many people had to suffer and such a wonderful Australian brand had to take such a drastic hit, to show some of these simple social media strategies and techniques.

Would love your thoughts below!

 

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13 comments

  1. Matt
    10/31/2011 at 5:46 pm
    # 1

    Great analysis, Kate! I noticed SMH article on this from @ashermoses –

    http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/computer-says-no-qantas-rapped-for-bad-social-media-service-20111031-1mr8t.html

    I note that you can comment upon, Facebook-share and Tweet whole SMH articles, but not the individual comments below the article.

    So, we haven’t quite gotten to the stage of being able to easily retweet the individual users’ comments, upon the mainstream media article, about the lack of social media responsiveness of a large corporation.

    BUT, there is some tweeting regarding the article itself here:

    http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.smh.com.au%2Ftechnology%2Ftechnology-news%2Fcomputer-says-no-qantas-rapped-for-bad-social-media-service-20111031-1mr8t.html

    Reply
    • Social Mediology
      10/31/2011 at 6:43 pm
      # 2

      Thanks for the links Matt. Will be fascinating to see how it continues to unfold.

      Reply
      • Trypheyna
        11/01/2011 at 1:30 pm
        # 3

        Great info Kate, We have been stuck in the middle of all of this chaos, unable to get any info or means of contact with Qantas. Shockingly bad – from customer service perspective!! So sad to see an Ozzie icon disintegrate like this unnecessarily. In fact we are now in hotel in Buenos Aires that Qantas organised, after we got to airport for our flight today, only to be told we will now not be out of here until Wednesday!! Change of plan not an issue – being ignored and treated as if of no consequence by Qantas a very big no-no.

        Reply
  2. Louise
    10/31/2011 at 6:39 pm
    # 4

    Thanks for this – very interesting, couldn’t agree more! I think this whole thing has been an amazingly badly thought-out game of brinkmanship. They exchanged bad media coverage around Australia for catastrophic media coverage around the world. OK, they did manage to drag in the Government to stop the industrial action, but the timing of doing this only days after awarding Alan Joyce the massive pay-rise (during an industrial dispute over pay and conditions) has to be up there as a world-class poor PR exercise. http://mudmap.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/vale-qantas/

    Reply
  3. Cara
    11/01/2011 at 9:58 am
    # 5

    As someone who works in the social media team for Qantas (note: opinions are my own), I will offer the following points:

    1. There was no deletion of posts from the wall except where they used unacceptable profanity or were consistently spamming the wall.

    2. We had resource on standby and were watching the conversation, however it is very difficult to ‘pick off’ a few tweets to answer – then you only incite more anger and frustration from the people who you are ignoring. If you followed the ash cloud drama at all you might know that Twitter has a tweet limit, which is extremely quickly exhausted in these situations. When this happens you cannot get even the most important information out to people, let alone individual responses. On top of this, the more you respond to people the more your feed gets clogged by response tweets, rather than the main information. This causes people to not be able to access the important information and thus ask more questions that could have been answered if they had have seen the key tweets we sent out. Instead it was decided by management to continually monitor the feed and continue to tweet out broadcast messages that answered the questions that everyone had. Whilst I understand this isn’t considered ‘best practice’ for Twitter, given the fact we literally had no more information that what we were saying, there was little else we really could do to effectively help people. We didn’t have answers. We didn’t know anything more than the general public.

    3. We provided information continually on both Facebook and Twitter. There was absolutely no further information that we had that we didn’t provide. In fact, we posted information the very second it came to hand, before even other staff members across the company may have known.

    4. Unfortunately Facebook profanity settings and block words do not seem to work very effectively. Despite adding just about every offensive word to the block list, it seemed that posts appeared anyway. I am chasing this up with Facebook.

    I understand ‘social media experts’ feel the need to do case studies on every little thing that corporates do, and I’m guilty of this myself, being one of you. However I would urge that you try to consider the wider situation. A lot of assumptions have been made in relation to this and I feel that people are extremely quick these days to play the blame game with big companies, without really thinking too much about it. To begin with, there was no ‘prior knowledge’ of this – I am fairly sure had there been the media would have caught hold of it. Secondly, there was absolutely NO further information that we could provide – we literally knew no more than the news was providing. Thirdly, there were A LOT of legal implications with what was happening. This talk of us being ‘wooden’ and ‘corporate’ is probably quite true, and the reasoning is that in these type of situations you have no choice but to follow strictly worded (legally approved) text or face huge legal implications. It’s not easy to be happy and light about such a serious actions. How would the public have reacted had we tweeted something like “So sorry guys but all Qantas planes are grounded from today. Sorry for the inconvenience! :( ” – I’m fairly sure that would have attracted a much worse backlash.

    If anyone has followed the normal feed of the Qantas twitter or Facebook account, you will know we are not overly ‘corporate’, we do respond to all enquiries and we don’t ‘censor’ people (though continually they accuse us of doing so – a quick scan of the wall will prove that we clearly don’t).

    It’s not my intention to come off looking defensive here (though I recognise it obviously will at least to some degree!) but I do find it frustrating that people don’t really stop to really consider what might be happening behind the scenes.

    Happy to take further criticism or answer any other questions, but hopefully this has helped explain at least some of our ‘failings’.

    Thanks for the feedback, in any case.

    :)

    Reply
    • Social Mediology
      11/01/2011 at 3:58 pm
      # 6

      Thanks Cara

      Great insights into the behind the scenes. I thought about you all a lot over the weekend, as I can’t imagine what it was like.

      My intent was to help others see some of the issues rather than rubbish Qantas. Real life reflections are the best learning tools!

      Happy to post any further comments or insights from you as I think they are hugely valuable. No one ever knows what it is like on the inside and it is very easy to judge as an outsider!

      Have heard some great suggestions for how this could work in the future…..for any brand.

      Reply
    • Angela
      11/01/2011 at 4:35 pm
      # 7

      Hi Cara

      I hear you and I don’t wish to rebut the content of your post.

      I do wish to just say that whilst it may seem that the frustration is directed at frontline customer service/social media aspects of the company, I am fairly certain that most understand that the organisers of the ‘actionS’ that preceded the pr meltdown are squarely to blame.

      The communication failures between the Industrial Relations parties in the first instance, and then FROM the Board/CEO TO the rest of the staff and TO the community, are to blame.

      There’s been a mass failure of communication for it to come to this.

      Most people, surely, know this on a deeper level.

      In the end, the responsibility for protecting the brand lies much further up the line than the social media aspects of the organisation, and without communication and planning, SM staff can only put out spot fires on the fly, and even then, ineffectively.

      The saddest ‘brand disaster’ I have witnessed.

      Reply
    • Matt
      11/03/2011 at 5:41 pm
      # 8

      Hi Cara, thanks very much for your post.

      Please consider my comments below with a tone of optimistic future-gazing, rather than critical post mortem!

      And I’m going to drip-feed them, because I think that you’ve raised a few excellent, but quite separate issues.

      1. There was no deletion of posts from the wall except where they used unacceptable profanity or were consistently spamming the wall.

      Perhaps, for future cases — not just QF, but any major corp engaging in crisis management through social media — a few options could be considered, rather than deleting messages from the wall.

      I need to admit that I’m unsure of page administrators’ responsibilities when it comes to censoring wall content, but I’ve assumed that if a third party posts something offensive on a wall that it’s the third party who may be in breach of Facebook’s terms of service, not the page administrator — apologies if I’m confused about that.

      An option could be for the corporation to surrender proprietary control over the page, so that it becomes a Facebook ‘community’ page. For starters, the corp would not even be able to delete posts, but it would be able to respond to them and report irrelevant/offensive ones to Facebook.

      Because it’s not on the corp-controlled Facebook page, it’s more like a genuine online forum, rather than a corp-controlled pages that is susceptible to the online equivalent of graffiti on the side of a QF 737.

      If resources permit, a brief comment could be posted in response to an irrelevant/offensive comment, that the corp considers the post to be irrelevant/offensive, and that it has been reported to Facebook.

      While this may appear to be a form of censorship that is similar to deleting posts, it is more transparent, and genuine ‘posters’ will respect the corp for treating their concerns with much more respect than the malicious ones.

      In fact, this approach could be taken to a corp-controlled page — showing a great deal of restraint by not deleting posts — but there is that risk of being seen to permit the ‘graffiti’ to remain.

      That largely depends on the corp’s intended audience — and older, more conservative audience would probably prefer the profanity to be removed; but, irrelevant posts and spam should just be tagged with a comment in response as spam/irrelevant and flagged with Facebook, rather than deleted.

      The headline that we’re trying to avoid here is: ‘QANTAS DELETES CUSTOMERS’, or the like… ;->

      Reply
  4. Social Mediology
    11/04/2011 at 10:18 am
    # 10

    Ok…so no one picked the music…..check out this video and you’ll see where it comes from!

    I purchased that clip 2 years ago and have used it for other videos….imagine my surprise when I heard it as the background to the Qantas safety video! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu_P9tJODfo

    Reply

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