Digital and social media: Get with it or get left behind

There is no one more convinced about the power of digital media as a marketing platform than AirAsia's Regional Head of Commercial, Ms Kathleen Tan. "If you aren't in digital yet, then you will be left behind," is how she sees it.

Her airline, which will fly its 100th million passenger by the third quarter of this year, is heavily engaged in the online world. Up to 80% of its sales come through the Internet, and social media is increasingly becoming a powerful platform for the airline.

Modest beginnings and big returns

Indeed, Ms Tan said she herself did not appreciate how big social media would become when she first started an interactive unit in her marketing division in April 2009. It started with one staff and its goal was modest - it wanted to build a fan base of 50,000 in a year. By April this year, its fan base had reached 215,000 and its team now stands at five staff.

She said, "With an average of 6,500 fans and over 33,000 visits to our fan page weekly, we know that they are taking us seriously on the social media front."

Optimizing marketing through Facebook

She said that AirAsia's Facebook Fan Page has enabled the airline to steer away from the usual limitations of conventional marketing, which consumers are no longer reacting to. "The forum-like nature of Facebook has been a catalyst for AirAsia to move into new media and digital marketing, further enhancing its e-commerce nature."

She added, "We value our guests' feedback through social media, especially through our Facebook page. We can now be more relevant in providing content, based on feedback or requests from our guests, instead of just sending out a one-way marketing push or product updates.

"With Facebook, we are able to optimize our engagement and interaction with our guests, apart from creating a fun and creative platform among the social media community.

"Apart from that, our Facebook Fan Page has enabled guests from around the globe to share their travel experiences, create travel networks, as well as receive real-time information updates on our flight operations and local airport conditions, such as the recent snowstorm in London."

Reducing advertising costs

AirAsia has also proven that social media can also help sell seats and reduce advertising spend. Last November, when it launched what it calls its annual "major schedule extension campaign" in which it typically spends up to RM2 million in full print advertisements in newspapers, it decided to use its Facebook fan page.

Over three to four days, it rolled out teasers everyday, with some saying, 'the best things in life are free' and asked fans to log in on November 11 at midnight.

"When the sale opened, the system crashed," said Ms Tan, who said the airline broke Navitaire's records on two days. On day one, it sold 404,000 seats and on day 2, it sold 489,000 seats.

It still took out print advertisements in countries where its Facebook fan page's penetration wasn't as deep such as China, East Malaysia and Vietnam where it spent between RM200,000 and RM300,000 on advertisements.

"That savings goes directly to the bottom line," said Ms Tan, "and I can also use the money to hire more people in digital media. The beauty of digital is with analytics, I can check where the sales are coming from, something you can't do with offline media."

Tourism boards need to pay attention to digital space

This is why she applauds the move by the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) to go heavily digital in its new branding strategy under the destination brand campaign, YourSingapore. "I think they are smart. They have the gall to do it. The timing is right. Anyone that does not engage with digital media now will be left out."

She said many tourism boards were still trapped in "legacy thinking" and were working with outdated models.

"They think we bring young and cheap travellers, they are so wrong," she said. "Tourism boards don't realise demographics are changing and the way people buy travel has changed."