Singapore Airlines A380 Emergency Landing in Baku: Analysing user behaviour on social media, and how to deal with a crisis.

 The importance and power of social media nowadays cannot be ignored. News shared on social media reaches millions in seconds, which goes on to spark discussion. Companies have realized how useful social media can be to their brand, thus they use it as a communication tool with customers. Social media has the power to make or break a brand.
      The Singapore flight from London scheduled to land in Singapore was forced to make an emergency landing in Baku Airport, Azerbaijan. The airline reported that this resulted from a loss of cabin air pressure.
An interesting series of event that happened during the situation was the passenger’s use of social media. During the airline making efforts to provide replacement aircraft, passengers took to twitter to express their frustrations.
   An article “Singapore Airlines A380 Emergency Landing in Baku: Analyzing user behavior on social media, and how to deal with a crisis“ posted on the 9^th of January 2014, described the event, which took place.
Reactions from passengers aboard the flight depict the influence of social media on people. In the midst of tension, some passengers took “selfies” wearing their oxygen masks, which were posted on Facebook and twitter. In terms of the behaviors of the passengers on social network, they can be sorted as follow as the case study showed:

- The complainer: It is quite natural when the passengers just suffered all that stress of high level from the potential tragedy that they need a outlet for their strong emotion. Furthermore, we can observe from the official Facebook page of SIA, some anger was caused by the inability of SIA to arrange a hotel for these tired and terrified passengers. As a result they eventually spent18 hours within the terminal waiting for the next empty aircraft from London to pick them up.

- The thankful and the advocate: many people expressed their gratitude to the crew and the wise decision to land in Azerbaijan through Twitter and Facebook. Others convinced by the good experience they had with SIA would probably turn into ambassador of Singapore airline and defense the brand with their own stories. This post could become strong branding power for SIA because they revise, to some extent, the biased negative comments by showing the different perception of one issue.

- The relatives of the passengers: this is an interesting group because even though they were not on board, their opinions are directly impacted by the story telling. For these passengers who do not use the social network, their attitudes can be shown through their relatives who are active online.

Crisis is inevitable, as such, companies need to be knowledgeable on how best to manage a situation. The article also disclosed that Singapore Airlines previously attend a course developed by SimpliFlying “IATA Airline Social Media Strategy Course”. In this case, the incident was firstly reported by BBC journalist who instantly captured a tweet of a passenger and this is before SIA could make the official statement on Facebook. With the inevitable involvement of media and the customer’s generated content (CGC) on social network, SIA’s reaction during the incident refers to two dimensions: on-site and online.
Singapore airline lived up to its reputation and handled the situation quite well. It issued a statement on its Facebook page about the situation and consequently followed with updates. This is important because people heard directly from the ‘horse’s mouth’. Consequently, false stories are not fabricated thereby causing people to panic. Furthermore, SIA’s prompt notification and the following interaction kept pace with media news report, which minimised the potential terror caused by media exaggeration. On the contrary, the brand image could be enhanced by the appropriate transparency and positive comments on Internet. 

  

However, the on-site performance is less good than the online response. The lack of explanation from airline staff has kept passengers confused and angry after the horrible time in plane. Even they had to get information from Facebook. The problem of arranging a hotel was due to the visa regulation with local authorities, but the fact that no staff came out to explain the situation was definitely SIA’s fault.
    

  Appendix

 SIA- Singapore International Airline

 IATA- International Air Transport Association

 Selfie- “A photograph that one takes of oneself with a digital camera or a front-facing smartphone, tablet, or webcam, especially for posting on a social-networking or photo-sharing website: selfies posted by teens on Twitter.” Source: Dictionary.com

 Singapore Airlines A380 Emergency Landing Social Crisis Management case study: http://fr.slideshare.net/shanxz/singapore-airlines-a380-case  

Official Singapore Airlines Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/#!/singaporeair?fref=ts

Written by Jin Yue & Rhoda Nuhu