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“Scattered by thousands of miles, but online we can be right next to each other” Employee Engagement & Social Media on a Low-Fare Budget -Southwest Airlines’ Millie Richter

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“Scattered by thousands of miles, but online we can be right next to each other”

Employee Engagement & Social Media on a Low-Fare Budget

Millie Richter, Southwest Airlines Employee Communications Specialist
Presented by Yankee Chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC)
Hosted by RDW Group

Reinforce SWA culture, pursue transparency, seek informed employees

Every day
Today@SWA M-F newsletter:

  • 34K employees via company email
  • Printed and hung at every work location
  • Started in 1983, at that time was hand-delivered, weekly


SWALife intranet active 24/7

  • Pulse point, weekly survey: gauge how feel or understanding of concepts
  • Roundtables for various departments


Each Week

  • Gary’s New Line (CEO Gary Kelly): via phone, call in to recording, give shout out to celebrate employees
  • Red Belly Radio: podcast, similar to “This American Life”
  • SWA TV: video programming for employees: how-to, sneak peek of ad campaigns


Monthly
LuvLines

  • 24-32 page magazine to all employees
  • full color funded by ads
  • in depth for what’s going on
  • embed employee number in each issue to win non-standby passes

Recent issue: Boston Launch
TweetUp the night before, volunteer cleanup and painting at a school

Quarterly
Southwest score card

  • 13 metrics across 5 areas that impact performance, including
  • safety
  • fuel efficiency
  • customer service


Annually

  • Mid-year DVD, but this year visiting 35 locations for open forums
  • “Message to the Field” State of Union


Other communications initiatives

Operation Kick Tail

  • #1 Low cost, customer satisfaction & employee spirit
  • When you see employee doing great job, write it up, give 10 $1,000 tax-free prizes monthly, plus addt’l prizes


Show “Airline” on A&E SWA had no editorial control

Nuts About Southwest blog

  • Virtual focus group
  • Make and break news
  • Tell rest of the story: why we did it
  • Post even the bad feedback
  • 30+ employee bloggers
  • Bloggers selected for representing SW spirit and culture


Only 15 people on PR, media and internal communications team, so can’t do it all themselves

Active on social media as well as aviation blogs: passionate about travel and aviations, supportive even though they can be critical

Blog 2.0

  • launched 2008
  • YouTube feeds, more creativity
  • Visits up 25%
  • Visitors staying 26% longer
  • Page views up 40%
  • Conversions up but statistic not available to share

Employee bloggers

  • Write about something passionate about and what people will be interested in
  • Don’t edit for content
  • Blog is moderated, no personal attacks or vulgarity, 2 moderators


Starting internal blog next year

Blog Case Study
Open Season on Assigned Seating

  • 700 comments
  • Most said don’t change it
  • Influenced the new boarding process
  • Virtual focus group


YouTube
Have pros putting together segments
Rapping flight attendant: got mainstream coverage simply using YouTube and Twitter, singing flight attendant also got traction

Advice: put it up and see what happens: Commercial circa 1972

Email correspondence from customers, email them a video that explains the problem: “why delayed?” “ATC” “what’s that?” “Watch this”

Twitter
started July 2007, took off the first quarter of this year, ave 7,000 new followers per day

Crisis communication: Twitter broke Hudson landing story within 10 minutes
Learned that had to build online communications into crisis communications

Employees need to be aware everyone is a reporter

Decompression hole: Tweet congratulated crew, assured everyone was safe, next day reported that planes were inspected

Facebook

  • Started with contests, marketing messages
  • Caught on among non-true believers who abandoned, but now have nearly 80,000 fans (as of publish date)
  • Up to 200 comments a day, both good and bad


Southwest’s Communications Tips

  • Establish communications channels and build relationships before you really need them
  • Fans will defend you
  • Don’t be afraid to interact: get out there and be real
  • Act fast, perfection isn’t
    paramount
  • Harder to repair reputation damage than to maintain it
  • Look outside your department to build a strong team


Keep social media in communications, not marketing; Southwest cares about getting to know people, not just pushing sales.


Another big brand making a big splash

Blog and content strategies with Stephen Turcotte of Backbone Media at the Boston SEO Meetup

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Blog and content strategies with Stephen Turcotte of Backbone Media
October meeting of Boston SEO Meetup

Food sponsor CookieOutlet.com, coupon offer code: BostonSEO

Backbone Media, started 1996, didn’t realize were doing content strategies


Content strategy

Taking something you already have, know about, that your customers are interested in and make it useful to them

Every strategy starts with a goal

  • Who are your customers
  • What are they looking for?
  • Solutions?


The Balsams.com resort in NH

  • What else could be done to drive new people?
  • Campaign: Take your family to get your kids off the wii
  • Keywords
  • Audience that you want to reach: i.e. Mothers concerned about “kids spending too much time …”


Tibco: biz intel software

  • Write about trends in software space
  • Find experts who bloggers
  • Use diff angles, leverage content already out there in Forbes, Biz Journal, summarize and then add your angle
  • ID keywords, which ones are you not hitting


Creating content

Best when company can write its own content, but it’s hard to do, takes so much time to find something to write about, publish it, and follow upon the comments

Great bloggers tend to peter out after time
Thanks for further clarification from Stephen Turcotte:

“Lots of companies think they have people who could be great bloggers, but they tend to peter out after time” it would be more accurate to what I was trying to say. In contrast, a common trait in successful bloggers is that they maintain a strong commitment to listening, writing posts, and commenting regularly; month after month,year after year. It takes a special commitment to doing that.

Editor’s note: That is what he said, but my fingers couldn’t keep up. Back to our program …

Have someone relevant in-house, but clients know don’t have time to do it

Tie into Twitter and FB, get active on Twitter, push clients

Should be posting 2-4 times a week for difficult keywords, less if you’re in a niche


Planning

  • Where see best bang for the buck?
  • What topics can’t cover in the site but that are of interest to your customers?
  • What’s relevant to customer in past 2 weeks, 6 months, 2 years: Example: Swine flu


Execution

  • Think a little outside the box
  • Have quality and be useful
  • Don’t do what everyone else is doing, building content over time
  • Be relevant to audience, even if you’re regulated, there’s areas of interest
  • Talk about topics that affect your targets


Tracking conversions

  • Help the company by creating a strong call to action, convert a visitor into a lead
  • Get them into the blog: Can be tracked organically based on keyword
  • Convert them to someplace: Really strong call to action: Go to form and fill it out, that’s a conversion
  • 10-20 articles in second month, start measuring in months 3-5


Results

  • Create a footprint for the business, goal isn’t to be the best blogger
  • Publish where it’ll  stick, get into architecture that will last, won’t disappear, going to keep it for 2-3 years
  • Think of how much traffic can this content send to my company for the next 1-2 years


Previous SEO Meetups


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