#travelfail or #success?

by Mark Frary

One of things you hear frequently about social media is that you have to accept that things will go wrong from time to time but that you don’t need to worry about this. It is accepted that because of the immediacy of Twitter, Facebook and the like, the team or person handling social media will sometimes make a rash decision that proves fatal.

The world of travel is littered with the corpses of social media campaigns that #failed.

Take the Australian airline Qantas for example. Last November, it launched a Twitter competition for its followers to win “a First Class gift pack featuring a luxury amenity kit and our famous QF PJs.”

To win the pyjamas, followers had to tweet their own dream in-flight experience and use the hashtag #QantasLuxury.

Sadly for the airline, the campaign was quickly hijacked by disgruntled passengers who used the hashtag to complain about their nightmare experiences of the airline. Earlier that month, Qantas had had to ground its fleet. For the airline, the nightmare continues – the hashtag has taken on a life of its own and is still being used today to share and experiences.

Another example of social media going wrong is the #SunnySideofLife campaign. The tourism organisation of the Maldives encouraged travel businesses in the country as well as previous visitors to tweet their experiences of the destination. It was quickly hijacked by human rights protesters.

It is not just tourism businesses that are #failing either. Waitrose felt the full fury of the Twitterati when it launched its #waitrosereasons campaign which encouraged people to complete the phrase I shop at Waitrose because… There were thousands of reasons submitted, though very few of the type that the Waitrose marketing team wanted; “they have a better class of shoplifter” is an example of a typical response to the campaign.

Yet Twitter has been abuzz with speculation that Waitrose’s #fail was in fact a spectacular #success. Perhaps the campaign was a case of any publicity being good publicity. All three of these campaigns have certainly resulted in the brands in question being discussed exhaustively on social networks.

You could say that it was inevitable that these campaigns would be hijacked. Twitter users have now, arguably, become bored of these sorts of campaign and that they would always attract the internet trolls.

The question is where do tourism businesses go now with Twitter. It seems certain that the days of the tweet-nice-things-about-us-and-use-our-hashtag campaign are numbered and that social media managers are going to have to be far more creative in how to get their brands going viral. If these tourism organisations really did not care about whether tweets were positive or negative then they were very clever indeed.

• One of the sessions at WTM Social Travel Market this November will look at crisis management and social media. The session, run by 501places travel blogger Andy Jarosz and including travel industry consultant Jeremy Skidmore and Siren Communications, will look at how social media can instigate as well as help resolve a crisis.