This is a guest blog post written by Steve Richards, MD of social media agency, Yomego. In this entry, Steve analyses how the reputations of two online travel brands - Thomas Cook and Travel Republic - are faring in social media.
How a Social Media Reputation (SMR) is scored:
Yomego uses a combination of automated and human analysis to attribute a 'Social Media Reputation' score to a brand. This measures 'reach' (how many people are talking about the brand) and 'satisfaction' (whether those people are saying positive or negative things about it). Both are given a score out of 100. Yomego then applies a 'recency' score which means that recent conversations have more weight than those taking place months ago. All this goes into the final SMR score out of 100.
Thomas Cook
Thomas Cook, usually a fairly popular holiday brand in social media conversations, suffered a dip in fortune in early March, with the announcement that it is to impose a fuel surcharge of between £15 and £40 per person on flights - something that was much criticised in social media. It was further hit when news of the planned merger between the Co-Operative Group and Thomas Cook reached social media audiences (having been covered in most influential news sites). Some users expressed concern that the merger would damage the integrity of the Co-Operative brand, and would create further monopolisation of the tour operator market. Talk of job losses was also inevitable.
What's interesting is that our analysis shows that overall, satisfaction for Thomas Cook is quite high (scoring 76.25 out of 100). It has been negatively affected recently by the fuel surcharge and the Co-Operative partnership mentioned above. But its own foray into social media is relatively low for a brand of this size.
Twenty-six percent of all discussions about Thomas Cook take place on TripAdvisor (Thomas Cook encourages users to share their views; it uses TripAdvisor reviews alongside its own ranking system on thomascook.com), which once again highlights the importance of the review site on influencing travel decisions. Most comments on the site are positive, with just a few negative comments from users disappointed with premium seats, and some users complaining that Thomas Cook often charter Monarch planes. Twitter and social media forums (cruiseforums.cruisecritic.com features heavily) also each represent around 20 percent of discussions.
There's plenty of room for Thomas Cook to get more involved in shaping the conversations around its brand. While it links to its social media communities (Twitter, TripAdvisor, YouTube and its own customer community) from the company website, its content to those communities can be a bit haphazard. Video content seems to be uploaded to YouTube in batches - little and often would be a better approach to maintain customer interest over time. On Facebook, the brand is nearing 10k likes and its UK page provides prompt customer service. But there isn't much attempt at sustained engagement with fans, and the brand seems to favour 'pushing' corporate messages to fans, rather than engaging in conversations (which experience shows is a more effective way of developing loyal customers).
As a leading travel brand, the company can legitimately speak to customers about a range of inspiring topics - everyone loves to think about, talk about and share experiences of, their holidays. It could start small, by running a few competitions exclusive to Facebook, for example, and inviting users to talk about their favourite holidays and destinations as well as sharing their holiday snaps or videos.
Travel Republic
Travel Republic barely registers on the scoreboard of social media engagement, measuring just 7.4 out of 100 in terms of 'reach' (or 'noise'). This is getting better though; the brand is starting to engage over social media (it has 50,000 Facebook 'likes'), and has set up a YouTube channel (albeit featuring just two videos).
Satisfaction with the brand across social channels is very mixed, particularly on user forums. Liam10uk wrote about a bad experience with the company on Trip Advisor in a post entitled "Travel Republic/Easyjet Nightmare", which had 31 replies. Forums represent a significant proportion of online discussion about Travel Republic as 35 percent of discussion takes place on public forums, including some of the very popular sites such as Mumsnet. But the highest number of conversations are prompted by social news sites (accounting for 52 percent of all content). Travel Republic's recently published Top 20 Hotels in 2010 blog unveiled a £25-a-night hotel as its customers' top pick, and this news spread across major site including Yahoo, which helped to raise the brand's reach score.
Some negative sentiment came from users who had found a quote for their holiday on the company website, and later found the same hotel or packages cheaper elsewhere.
In order to boost its SMR score, there are certain issues Travel Republic could immediately address. On YouTube it has just two videos, and there is scope to create new content around top destinations (or the Top 20 Hotels), as well as including user-generated video footage from customers who have enjoyed their holiday with the company. These customers could be rewarded for their videos, to promote loyalty.
On Facebook, most of the company's recent posts simply ask more users to like the page, or for existing users to invite their friends to do the same. At best, this has a whiff of spam about it; at worst, desperation. Giving people a reason to like the page (competitions, incentives, or an airmiles type scheme) would create much more of an incentive for users to further engage with the brand.
For more information on Yomego's SMR scoring system, see www.MySocialMediaReputation.com.
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