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AAdvantage frequent flier number when communicating through Direct Messages, as I have done, the team adds the number to the person’s internal social profile maintained at the airline. That way, a person’s social profile and customer profile are merged. In my case, the team knows me as more than just @dmscott on Twitter, who has more than 125,000 followers. They know I’ve also been a frequent flier for 20 years and have flown over two million miles on American Airlines, making me among their best customers. All of this information pops up on the social media representatives’ screens as they interact with somebody on a network. They can go back and look at the history of all social engagements between the airline and that customer. This is another example of how real-time social networking has become a fully integrated aspect of American Airlines’ business, much more than for a typical company that uses social networking just to promote products. I’ve interacted on Twitter with hundreds of companies I do business with, and I don’t know of any besides American Airlines that have merged public social networking feeds with private customer data to understand the total picture of the people they are interacting with.

      Besides the global social media team, there are many individual employees who are active on social networks and who serve as unofficial brand ambassadors for American Airlines as a result. For example, @taylortippett is an American Airlines flight attendant with well over 100,000 Instagram followers, and Brad Tate is a Dallas/Fort Worth–based first officer who tweets to his 18,000 followers at @AAfo4ever. “We’ve got lots of pilots who take great, amazing pictures,” Pierce says. “In fact, we use a lot of that content for our own proactive engagement.”

      Toward the end of the day I visited the American Airlines Integrated Operations Center (IOC), where 1,600 employees operate in one arena-like room. The 150,000-square-foot facility is where real-time flight operations for the entire airline and its one million yearly flights are conducted, including dispatch, crew scheduling, air traffic control, maintenance operation control, customer service, and other functions. It was here, in the nerve center of the largest airline in the world, where it became crystal clear to me how important real-time social networking is to running the airline, or managing any large business. In fact, in the center of the room is what they call “the bridge,” which is where the operations manager for the entire American Airlines system sits together with a handful of key staff. And right next to the operations manager is a representative of the social team.

      “Every passenger on a plane is a reporter now,” says Pierce. “They’ve got phones, and they are sometimes tweeting about things faster than our team members can tell us what’s going on. That’s really useful. Maybe there are people arguing on the plane, or it’s delayed, or they pulled somebody off, or somebody’s not comfortable on board. We find out immediately. We’ll let others on the bridge know what we’re hearing about the situation on this particular flight.”

Having a social media representative sit on the bridge was originally done on a short-term trial basis, but the benefits to the entire airline became obvious very quickly. The arrangement was made permanent after just a week. “It still amazes me to see something going on at the IOC and the operations manager will turn around and say, ‘What have we seen on social? Is there anything going on?’” Pierce says. “They’re communicating with our team just as much as we’re communicating with them. It’s a really great partnership.”

      I went to American Airlines to learn how the airline uses real-time social networking to communicate with customers who tweet cute photos like mine. I wasn’t expecting to learn how important real-time customer communications are for running the entire airline. American Airlines is an amazing example of the new rules of marketing and public relations at work throughout an organization. But it’s not just large organizations that can operate this way. I’ll share many more examples in these pages of companies small and large that are making the new rules work for them, too.

      In the following chapters that make up Part II of the book, I introduce social media, blogs, online video, podcasting, content-rich websites, real-time marketing and PR, and artificial intelligence and machine learning. Then Part III presents a guide to creating your marketing and PR plan (Chapter 10), followed by detailed chapters with how-to information on each technique. Content turns browsers into buyers. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling premium wine cabinets or a new music CD, or advocating to stop sonar harm to whales, web content sells any product or service and advocates for any philosophy or image.

      Notes

      1 1zerotrash.org

      2 2facebook.com/ZeroTrash

      3 3century21.com

      4 4chaacreek.com

      5 5belize-travel-blog.chaacreek.com

      6 6bigbirgeplumbing.com

      7 7trinitycleveland.org

      8 8traceylind.com

II Web-Based Communications to Reach Buyers Directly

4 Social Media and Your Targeted Audience

      As millions of people use the web for conducting detailed research on products and services, getting involved in political campaigns, joining music and film fan clubs, reviewing products, and discussing hobbies and passions, they congregate in all kinds of online places. The technologies and tools, which many people now refer to collectively as social media, all include ways for users to express their opinions online:

       Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn help people cultivate a community of friends and share information.

       Blogs, personal websites written by somebody who is passionate about a topic, provide a means to share that passion with the world and to foster an active community of readers who provide comments on the author’s posts.

       Video and image sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, SlideShare, and Instagram greatly simplify the process of sharing and commenting on photos, graphic images, and videos.

       Chat rooms and message boards serve as online meeting places where people meet and discuss topics of interest, with the main feature being that anyone can start a discussion thread.

       Review sites such as Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, Amazon, and TripAdvisor are places where consumers rate products, services, and companies.

       Wikis are websites that anybody can edit and update.

       Social bookmarking sites like Reddit allow users to suggest content to others and vote on what is interesting.

       Mobile applications with GPS-generated location services add the component of identifying exactly where each user is in the world.

      What Is Social Media, Anyway?

      Since social media is such an important concept (and is so often misunderstood), I’ll define it:

      Social media provides the way people share ideas, content, thoughts, and relationships online. Social media differs from so-called mainstream media in that anyone can create, comment on, and add to social media content. Social media can take the form of text, audio, video, images, and communities.

      The best way to think about social media is not in terms of the different technologies and tools but, rather, how those technologies

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