Qantas leaves tweeters delayed and confused
OCT 30, 2011: Unless you have been sleeping under a very large rock, you have heard that Qantas has grounded its fleet crippling Australian and international air travel. For Qantas and its communications team, this is a career defining moment. This crisis will be spoken about at conferences, printed in text books and hailed or decried as the best or worst example of how to handle communications in a crisis.
But as I, like thousands of other Australians, watch events unfold on Twitter, there is one big question confusing question: “Which Qantas twitter account do you follow for the latest news on the crisis?”
Qantas has multiple Twitter accounts. They include: @QantasAirways @QantasMedia and @QFcustomercare. On any other day this would not pose an issue, but when the CEO drops one of the biggest bombshells in aviation history, and thousands of people turn to Twitter to stay informed, it is.
Qantas defines these Twitter account, as:
- QantasAirways: ‘The official Qantas Twitter broadcast channel.’
- QFcustomercare: ‘The official Twitter account for Qantas Customer Care.’
- QantasMedia: ‘The official Qantas Twitter broadcast channel, providing breaking news to the media.’
Having accessed all three accounts, @QantasAirways is the account the airline is using to provide regular updates. But this is not the primary account Qantas is directing people to on its website. The ‘crisis page’ is recommending people use @QantasMedia for ‘breaking news’ and that the @QantasAirways account should be used to ‘share information’.
At the time of writing this blog post (11.40am, 30 October), the @QantasMedia account had not been updated for 17 hours and the @QFcustomercare account had not been updated since October 28.
In a crisis, do you really want people guessing which account to follow? No.
In a crisis, what you need is clarity, and this is the downside of having multiple Twitter accounts for one company or brand. So if like Qantas you have multiple accounts and you want to make it clear which account people should follow, what can you do?
- Use one account for all crisis communications so it is clear to everyone where to get information.
- Change the twitter account description during the crisis so it is obvious to anyone that “this account is the place for the latest news on the crisis”
- Make sure your ‘crisis’ page clearly points people to your chosen account
- Establish a hashtag and include this on your crisis page
- Include the hashtag in every tweet so that people can follow the tag even if they don’t know which account to follow.
True, all of this is easy for me to say when I’m not at the helm of the Qantas social media desk in the middle of a major crisis, but I’m sure I’m not the only one looking for a true, clear source of information amid the social storm that’s hit the net over the last 48 hours.
