US Airways Plane Crashed - Twitter Storm Follows

Image from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

The immediacy of Social Media was illustrated today when a US airways flight crash landed into the Hudson River at 3:31pm after a “double bird strike” disabled both engines. At 3:36pm a ferry passenger uploaded a picture of the passengers on the wings of the drowning plane onto Social Media site Twitter from his mobile phone.  The post read “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”

The photo on Twitter received 7000 views and over 500 download requests every 15 seconds. The enormous traffic on the Twitter site caused the application to crash but not before the photo was picked up various news sites and spread further. Whereas traditional media would have taken much longer to pick up and air the story, the instantly updateable nature of Social Media meant that thousands around the world knew about the US airways tragedy within minutes of it happening.

While Social Media can be beneficial to marketers because it provides the ability to access a community and conduct a two way conversation with them, it can also be used as a conduit for negative messages that can affect your brand reputation.

 The US airways brand reputation remains intact due to the courageous crash landing of the pilot, an act the state governor called the “Miracle on the Hudson”. It also helps that birds have become a common aviation hazard - hitting one in ten thousand planes. Online comments have therefore avoided laying blame on US airways.

 However this outcome could have been quite different however, had any of the 150 passengers had been seriously hurt. The power of Social Media as a communications tool as shown in this example means that companies should be paying a lot of attention to what is being distributed and said about them online in order to react before their brand is harmed. Twitter has millions of users and US airways customers are engaging in this public forum. The lesson to be learnt here is that companies like the US should be monitoring Social Media sites. Evidently your reputation can be affected by just a handful of tweets.