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Social media case study: KLM Royal Dutch Airlines

Avatar Image6th October 2011, 03:07 pm  by George Cathcart

Social media campaigns are absolutely everywhere now. Seldom that original, and often poorly executed, the space is becoming so turgid with a mix of good, bad, ugly and downright embarrassing examples of campaigns that it’s becoming harder to stand out from the crowd.

But as with everything, there are a few shining stars in the ether, and one of those in the social media space is KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. Granted, they are incredibly vocal and they are never not doing something, but there are 3 campaigns in particular that stand out for me from KLM that deserve some recognition.

KLM Surprise

First up is the KLM Surprise campaign. KLM wanted to reach out to KLM passengers in the real world to reward them for flying with KLM. They monitored check-ins on Foursquare at KLM locations and did some social media monitoring to find the people that mentioned KLM in their check-in. When they had a picture of who the person was, their activities, interests and personalities, they hunted them down, bought them a small gift,  and gave it to them as they waited for their flight.

This campaign really punched above its weight for a few reasons. The numbers paint the first picture: 1 million impressions on Twitter alone came from the few weeks of gifting. The shady area of impression analysis aside, that’s a pretty major number and one to shout about (which they do indeed do). The other side, and the real gem here, is their insight in taking the offline conversation back into the real world, albeit briefly, and managing to turn an average day in a few customers lives into a pretty awesome day that they felt the need to share. Brands these days are so hung up on the digital conversation that they often forget the power of the offline element too.

Tile & Inspire

The Tile & Inspire campaign is another great example of KLM both engaging their fans but also re-affirming their Dutch brand identity in one fell swoop. Using a Facebook app, fans could upload a photo of themselves that would be made up in the style of a delft tile and entered with a chance of being painted onto a real Boeing 777-200.

In doing this, KLM sent out a very clear message to their fans: we’re serious about you. We want to have our customers woven into the fabric of our brand, and we’re excited about a future where our customers shape how the world perceives us. It’s an important lesson – if a brand is not sincere in their involvement of their customers then they won’t reap the rewards that they are after.

Live Tweet

The Live Tweet campaign took a bunch of KLM employees (140 to be precise) and used them as a ‘live’ tweeting medium for a single day. Each person had a character, and they were used to spell out tweets as replies to the tweets that KLM were receiving.

Yes there will be those that are screaming that they are just re-hashing the work of W+K on the Old Spice campaign, and yes there is some cross over, but it was executed pretty well. The purpose of this campaign was to highlight their social media services – to let people know that there are people on the other end of Facebook and Twitter 24/7 waiting to help out. It’s just another example of how KLM is telling their customers that they are invested in being as accessible and helpful as they can be, and social media is one of the best ways that this can happen.

You can pretty much sum up KLM’s ideas on how important their social media audience is with this advert; drawing a parallel between football fans and the passion inherent in supporting a team with an airline is an unusual association to create, but with the hyperbole aside, it’s one they seem to believe in none the less.

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    • 2 Comments

    1. James Whatley:

      That tile idea was AWESOME. Creative aside, we really liked it for the social media best practice KLM demonstrated *after* the campaign finished. See the third item here – http://www.1000heads.com/2011/08/3ct-1/

      Also, did you guys ever see the Personal Space Experiment viral video? It dropped back in February and hit up around 800k hits – we liked it alot :)

      http://www.1000heads.com/2011/02/travel-tourism-klm/

      That fan video is awesome but I didn’t think that Live Tweet Reply thing went down very well? Admittedly I didn’t see much of it when it actually happened, but from what I read it seemed like it all just took a little bit too long?

      Interested to hear your thoughts :)

      James.

      11 October 2011, 5:34 pm

    2. George Cathcart:

      Hi James,

      Thanks for your comment. Good to see the KLM love extends across our industry! (although it’s not hard to see why)

      Keeping their app up and maintaining their digital real estate is a great move for sure; it lets people like us laud their efforts and it gives them maximum exposure as an airline that is in touch with the digital industry as well as their customers. I guess that’s why so many people rave about what they do – because what they do genuinely appears to have their customers interests at the heart of it.

      RE: the live tweet thing I’ve heard mixed reviews and yes, most of the negative ones criticise their actual execution saying it was, as you say, slow and not as impactful as it could have been. I actually have to agree with this point, but I didn’t bring attention to it in the post above because I feel as though poor execution on KLM’s part is more the exception to the rule, and the vision of what they wanted to achieve was completely in line with their usual focus on making the customer feel special and worth something to them.

      Regardless of whether a ‘tweet’ took too long to film and post, if I were one of the people that got my tweet replied to then I’d feel indebted in a way to KLM for going to the effort. It’s a gesture really, something that breaks the norm for what you’d expect on this medium. I guess it addresses that value gap between perception and reality – you wouldn’t expect a brand to go to so much effort, but when they do (and regardless of the fact the end result wasn’t quite fast enough) it’s a nice surprise. You feel like you’re getting value from them when they aren’t really doing anything that special.

      Everything that KLM do feels like a mass advocate building program – one that does it for the right reasons, one that doesn’t do it half-heartedly, and one that recognises that building a ‘relationship’ between KLM and its customers actually returns tangible benefit to the business. Heck, they’re building an advocate army – and that trumps bargain chasers every time (imo).

      12 October 2011, 11:39 am