Travelling with social media

The semester is almost over and travel is something I've been doing a lot of research about!

With so many vacations being booked online these days its becoming more and more important for the travel industry to use social media to promote themselves as well as monitor what other people are saying about them.

Here's a great example of a disgruntled passenger on a Virgin Atlantic flight who wrote an open letter to Sir Richard Branson about his distaste of the airline's food.

Virgin acted almost immediately and in fact offered the passenger a job as Virgin's food and wine critic (no joke!)

Virgin has since started using social media as a promotional tool. This summer Virgin Blue offered $9 twitter fares to 1000 people who followed Virgin Blue on Twitter.

This strategy of using social media to promote special travel deals is a great way for Virgin Blue to get there message out directly to their audiences. I think this is something we will see more companies start to adopt. Would you follow Virgin Blue on Twitter?

Starbucks burned by Twitter

Here's an example of good social media gone bad - a few months ago Starbucks launched a new ad campaign that promoted the quality of Starbucks coffee in an effort to take back sales from the "cheaper" coffee chains. To increase awareness of the campaign, Starbucks created a contest asking the public to find their ad posters and post a photo on Twitter.


The New York Times wrote a story about the Starbucks campaign which caught the attention of filmmaker, Robert Greenwald, who had been shooting an anti-Starbucks film about their labor practices and union busting.


On the website Stop Starbucks, Robert Greenwald put out a call asking people to enter the contest and post pictures on Twitter with messages about Starbucks' labor practices. Faster than you can order a Venti-double long-extra hot-skinny-latte the Starbucks campaign was hijacked by anti-Starbucks tweets like "Wake up and smell the union abuse."


The question is, could Starbucks have done anything to prevent the misuse of their campaign? Or does this mean that large high profile (and often controversial) organisations should shy away from using social media to promote themselves? What do you think?