Will Other Airlines Place Their Eggs In the Social Media Basket?

Australian LCC and Qantas group airline Jetstar has announced that it will increase its spend in Social Media in the next financial year to 40% of its total marketing budget. Jetstar head of marketing and public relations, David May, in announcing the change to the Australian media said they had “tested the waters” of social media during 2009 with huge success. He continued that the fragmentation and rapidly rising costs of traditional media on and offline it became clear to the airline that social media was the next obvious medium for marketing.

Some experts have predicted that Social Media spending will account for nearly 20% of all airlines marketing spend in 5 years. Of course that challenges a degree of belief. How will they actually spend the money?

Having armies of people watching Facebook or Tweeting like mad. Given that Social Media marketing costs should be significantly lower than traditional spend the greater bang for the buck is sounding more like we will have a new class of SM Maven who will be texting and blogging and posting away. Either way we will very soon have target fatigue.

I shudder to think what this will look like. We will be deluged with messages of little or no relevance. "Flight 101 took off with one guy who has baggy pants and a snake" would be the equivalent message on a slow news day.

I think we may just retreat to advertising for some straight forward sanity.

But then I am just one person who doesn't want to drink from a fat pipe of Twitter feeds.

Cheers

PS thanks to who ever posted this clip from Snakes on a Plane.