British Airways OpenSkies: social media partnership with Flyertalk.com 

The challenge 

 

Following our appointment to launch British Airways’ new premium airline OpenSkies, our first mandate was to identify a way of engaging business travellers outside of traditional media channels. We identified a handful of influential social media communities including Flyertalk.com.  

 

The tailored solution 

 

Twenty members of the influential Flyertalk.com community were given round-trip tickets to Paris for a long weekend. They were invited to try every aspect of the experience from the time they booked on flyopenskies.com, scheduled events and activities with the concierge and enjoyed the comfort and services in flight.

 

Naturally they then shared their experiences publicly through discussions on flyertalk.com, on their own blogs and photo feeds. The risk to OpenSkies was significant, being the airlines’ very first flight; much of the service hadn’t been perfected. However the refreshing open and honest approach to customers was truly embraced and resulted in an overwhelmingly positive response to the experience. 

 

The results

 

Community co-creation of the brand and the product built anticipation, pent-up demand and familiarity with the product even before it could be experienced.

 

Widespread word of mouth and inbound links from forums, blogs and communities allowed OpenSkies to grow awareness at a stage when advertising would have been illegal due to aviation industry regulation.

 

Significant advantages in search engine optimization (SEO) resulting in substantial organic search traffic.

 

Incremental bookings of higher-than-average revenue value and significantly higher rate of conversion amongst those reached by OpenSkies community efforts.

 

 

Download a PDF of this case study:
British Airways OpenSkies: social media partnership with Flyertalk.com

 

 

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