Ryanair’s blogger reaction - why?

February 27th, 2009 by Lloyd Gofton

It can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that Ryanair has been busy creating a lovely new social media case study for us all to use when extolling the pitfalls of not embracing social media.

If you have missed it, there are great write ups on Travolution, The Times, Guardian, Economist and Telegraph, plus probably the best of the bunch at datadial. That little bunch of headlines should tell you in an instant how dramatically this story has backfired on Ryanair.

However, if you have missed the story, here’s my attempt to shorthand it: Blogger notices glitch on Ryanair website and makes issue public, Ryanair staff respond calling the blogger an idiot among other things, not once, twice but three times, and then Ryanair release a statement confirming, and I quote:

“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot  bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.

“Lunatic bloggers can have the blogosphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.”

Wow, that is so wrong on so many levels that I don’t know where to begin. Not only does Ryanair obviously not have any type of social media policy, which is odd considering how closely the social web is linked to travel and specifically air travel, but when they had the chance to correct the initial mistake(s) instead they decide to continue to abuse the individual and blogosphere as a whole.

Now, obviously, i’m coming to this debate late, and with good reason. When this story broke everywhere on Tuesday/Wednesday I knew I had a presentation booked in at a major airline on Thursday afternoon. I hoped to pick their brains about the possible reasons for this seemingly suicidal course of action.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to discuss the issue in as much depth as I had wanted, due to unforeseen timing issues, but the general points from the team here and in the meeting seemed to be:

1. Astonishment, plain and simple, how could Ryanair react this way?

2. Was this reaction related to a fear of getting involved in social media?

3. Was it a stunt?

Now, I think we can rule out the third option, as if this was a stunt; now would be a very good time to reveal the reasons as the damage is increasing by the hour. I’d love to think this was an elaborate ploy, but history and common sense tells us not.

Point one, the ‘astonishment’ is fairly obvious, but i’m going to spell out the first five failings in my mind, there are many more.

1.) complete failure to understand the basics of communicating on the socially connected web

2.) complete failure to consider bloggers as an authority that can drive positive and/or negative experiences of your brand

3.) complete failure to deal with what is a customer relationship issue - whether online or offline.

4.) complete failure to listen, engage and react positively to what could have been a small issue, but is now a beast

5.) complete failure to apologise once the issue had been raised, staff had reacted poorly to the point of being rude, and instead back up the failings that had gone before it

So that leaves us with fear. Now i’m not suggesting that fear of getting involved in social media caused this issue directly. But i am saying a potential fear to embrace social media, probably because of the favoured excuse of ‘losing control’ and ’speaking with one voice’ has ultimately led to ignoring social media as a route to customers, which has in turn led to not training the individuals involved, not making whoever prepared the statement aware of the ramifications, and ultimately leaving the brand to be used as an example of ‘how not to do it’ on some of the UK’s leading media outlets. Let alone the discussion it has caused on Twitter.

The simple truth is it’s not possible to yet quantify the true scale of the problems this can cause for Ryanair, unless they turn it around quickly. We can already see the reaction, the search results that lead any online interest to this story when trying to book flights, and the backlash from customers. These reasons alone should be enough to see a change at Ryanair in terms of embracing, or at least understanding, social media.

But what’s this, a new story has just popped up from the BBC: Ryanair considers toilet charge not the reaction we were looking for.

      

Tags: bloggers, customer services, ryanair, Social media

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Blog, PR, Social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.