“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

“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