More about the travel and social media benchmark report.

A Which! survey has just found that despite seemingly cheap ticket prices, they simply hide more hidden costs than other airlines. Their charges increased by a massive 61 per cent (MORE than Bmibaby, Jet 2 and easyJet).

Why is this relevant for a Social Media blog? Because Social Media is all about personality.

How do you engage people, what is your online personality like, do people actually like you? This is equally (arguably more) important for brands as it is for individuals. And Ryanair has always maintained an… unapologetic online persona.

But with these findings showing they aren’t so cheap after all, might they need to improve their brand image to continue competing? Will it force a change in Ryanair’s external ‘persona’ and how they conduct their online – and offline – engagement?

Lunatic bloggers

Unless you’ve been in a cave pondering Platonian shadow dancers, you’ll know the appalling track record that Ryan Air has in terms of its online presence and engagement. If not, you can read more about their history of abusing bloggers and the like here.

If you haven’t got time to read a catch up, this quote from a friend sums up how many people feel perfectly:

I wouldn’t spend a second with a person who behaved like that – why would I spend any time (or money) with a brand like that?

Ryanair worst for ‘hidden costs’ that ramp up ticket prices

The findings of the Which! survey show Ryanair quoted £82 for a return flight for two to Paris but this increased by £50 to £132 with charges.

The brand isn’t yet showing any concern that this might affect business – in typical Ryanair fashion, spokesman Stephen McNamara said: “Nobody pays attention to Which? surveys and we’re not going to either.”

But with the knowledge that their hidden charges are higher than all of their competitors in the cheap air travel market, might that soon have to change?

I’m not going to hold my breath, but it would be nice to see something dent their ego a little.

With nearly 100 key players in the industry taking part from travel organisations large and small, Qube has gathered key insights into how this sector views and engages with the challenges and benefits of Social Media.

Social Media Benchmarking

81% of marketeers and directors in the travel industry say they use Social Media due to pressure from customers. And despite the fact almost two thirds of respondents felt Social Media was important for the future of their business, nearly 50% still use non-expert staff to deliver Social Media marketing.

Platforms

Bebo and MySpace, perhaps unsurprisingly, were the least popular social networks for marketing activity within the travel industry, while Twitter is by far the most popular tool in use for this sector.

Setting Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

Whilst there are many ways to measure Social Media activity and quantify ROI, difficulty in measuring direct impact of sales was far and away the greatest reason cited for not engaging with Social Media marketing.

Interesting, a large proportion of respondents don’t actually set any Key Performance Indicators for any of their current digital marketing activity.

Round table event

Qube will be releasing and discussing the full benchmarking report at the Social Media for the travel industry round table we’re holding on the 17^th February.

This is a chance for people in the travel industry to discuss the findings of the report and talk to each other about the particular challenges travel companies face in this ever-evolving digital era.

If you work in the industry and would like to attend, you can find more details here.

Qube is recruiting again. We’re looking for someone who is fascinated by digital/social technology and how it is impacting our lives.

Someone who can thrive in an open creative environment and personally contribute to the growth of the agency through ground breaking Social Media strategies and initiatives.

We are not necessarily looking for someone who has worked in Social Media before but you will need to have a solid experience in brand communications, ideally from a digital perspective. You will have good business acumen and a strong planning and/or research skill set, be able to take a brief, analyse it and propose the best solution.

Read the full job description here.

Download the Online Thought Leadership leads to Sales White Paper (pdf).

Read more information about the Social Media White Paper in the Social Media Reports section of our website.

Also, it has to be said Andrew, our MD, is also looking pretty foxy at the back there with his cigarette holder…

Fiona, unfortunately, seems to have gone all American Psycho… but you can’t have everything.

Merry Christmas all xxx

Qube at Christmas

Joe from X Factor - Raging

Poor old Joe ‘teeth’ McElderry… as every X Factor finalist is guaranteed a Christmas number 1, he must be more than a little gutted (although all of the previous winners must feel a little dispensible at Yuletide as at least 3 other finalists also record their No:1 song on the off-chance they’ll win).

Bad pun alert

The Facebook and Twitter campaign to secure Rage Against The Machine was… (wait for it) … a raging success. Sorry. No, really, I’m sorry.

Anyway, for the past week, I’ve seen mountains of Facebook updates, YouTube comments, tweets, retweets, @replies etc, all cajouling and egging each other on to download the Rage song and stop the EVIL that is X Factor. And it worked (although I didn’t buy either song, for the record).

Did people really care?

Now, I agree that X Factor has taken the fun out of the Christmas No:1 slot. I agree that mostly what Cowell gets the winner’s to trot out are crimes against nature – I mean, a Hannah Montana song. Seriously?

But I don’t think a lot of people jumped on the Rage bandwagon because they actually care that much about this. If they did, would they not have preferred getting a current, underrated band or artist to the top, one signed to an independant label and not to Sony?

People like being part of something

I think people jumped on the bandwagon because they like being part of something. A movement. They like being part of a community.

They like feeling that by joining together they can make something happen. Online communities give them power, peers and a voice. Whether they are actually bothered about what that voice is saying is another matter.

To me, that’s the power of social media. It can join people together because they like being connected – and that’s more important than whether they care that much about what they’re connecting about.

After a successful 18 months using social media to develop a community and change driving behaviour in West Sussex, the initiative has now been widened to cover the whole of Sussex.

Needless to say, we’re chuffed our social marketing baby is growing up and spreading its wings.

A big thank you to everyone involved, especially the team at West Sussex for being a great client. I also want to say a big thank you to our in-house team of social media analysts and outreach specialists.

Now stop reading this and get on with some work.

But - and it’s a big but – people are still reluctant to put money into social media outreach because they feel the case for it hasn’t been proved.

We’re lucky enough to have run a social media campaign directly benchmarked against a banner ad campaign to get real results.

What we found out was fascinating…. check it out:

http://www.qubemedia.net/banner-ads-social-media.php

Agree, disagree, interested, not interested… let us know what you think.

When we saw the job ad go up for this role yesterday, our first thoughts here in the Qube office were:

• Good on them – it’s about time and really forward thinking

and

• They’ll be lucky (to get one person, on that salary, who can deliver the complexities of a social media strategy for the council, build and manage online communities, engage with the public and deal with the politics and everything else this role will entail)

So it was really interesting for us to see @brightonargusjo’s reaction to the job on her twitter feed:

“Hiring someone to do it’s like hiring someone to send emails. It’s just another way of talking to people.”

“A lot of people will object to their tax being spent in this way.”

Now, I don’t want to go over the whole debate we had (quite difficult over Twitter with a 140 character limit, as it turns out), but there were a couple of points made about social media that I think are really important to address – especially in the context of the public sector.

1/ “it’s just another tool to talk to people”

Jo and a few others felt that the public sector shouldn’t have social media officers any more than they should have a dedicated email or phone officer. I couldn’t disagree more.

Councils, more than anyone else, have a duty to engage with people. What better way to research, understand what people want and encourage two way debate than by utilising the social web?

I’ve lost count of the number of people in organisations who say to me “oh, we’ve got a Facebook Group / Twitter account… but it doesn’t work for us.” (that’s why we developed our social media audit service).

Social media isn’t just another tool – to think it’s just about ‘sitting on’ Facebook and Twitter is to completely miss out how effective integration of a social media strategy into your marketing, research and customer service can be.

Developing and cultivating a community online is hard work and requires dedicated resource.

2/ “But why hire someone separate, rather than getting existing team to use?”

Because in the same way that you need a marketing director or manager, you need someone who is strategically thinking about how social media should be most effectively used to engage with the public (or your customers if you’re private sector).

Yes, everyone in your team should be involved. But someone needs to lead them.

This rationale is the same as people who don’t think you need professional copywriters. Everyone can write, can’t they? Why would you need to pay someone to do it? (This is a mistake organisations only tend to make once.)

Finally, Jo from the Argus tweeted earlier: “the council tweeter job debate was really interesting -thanks to all for a good head workout.” … I couldn’t agree more.

Interested to know anyone’s thoughts in 140 characters or more