Dirk Singer's, Head Rabbit at Rabbit Agency, CIPR Social Summer presentation of the Rabbit Agency's 2011 CIPR Excellence Award 'Best Use of Social Media' winning campaign for Gatwick Airport.

1. Talk to Gatwick - CIPR
Awards, best use of social
media

2. Text This is a campaign that
A - Had social media built in at the start,
rather than using it to amplify existing
activity
B - Made a real difference to the client
organisation and its audiences
C - Went beyond the marketing department
D - Included a number of ‘firsts’ as an airport
E - Tied together both the physical space of
the airport and social media
The headline

3. A bit of background
• Gatwick has 32 million passengers passing through each year
• Eighth biggest airport in Europe, 2nd biggest in the UK
• The world’s busiest single runway airport
• Previously owned by BAA - owner of Heathrow, Stansted, Glasgow,
Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen. LGW was sold when BAA changed hands at
the end of December 2009 (and it may now have to sell Stansted, Glasgow
and / or Edinburgh)
• LGW was very much in the shadow of LHR for most of the decade. Most
transatlantic flights moved to Heathrow

4. Background
Oct - Dec 2009 - Gatwick sold from
BAA to GIP
June 2010 - Rebrand and £1 billion
investment announced to transform
the passenger experience

5. Gatwick relaunch

6. Our brief
• Bring the £1 billion investment to life
• Communicate the ‘new’ Gatwick
• Find ways to elicit passenger feedback, improve customer services
• Make a difference on the ground
• Support airline and commercial partners
• Put distance between Heathrow / Gatwick

7. 2 - Give passengers a
1 - Bring the
way to feed back any
changes happening
comments or
to life concerns in real time
The communications team and
Rabbit developed a programme to
use online social tools to:

8. “What is the one thing that no
other airport is doing, that we
can do, that will make a
difference?”
The first question we
were asked

9. Solution - Round the clock Twitter
• Like most airports, Gatwick is not a 9-5 operation. The busiest time is in
fact 6-9am every morning. A lot of passengers do not tweet out comments
while the marketing department is at work
• Some passengers will stay as little as 60-90 minutes in the airport
environment - the window to reply to them is fairly small
• Our answer - introduce Twitter as a (near enough) round the clock customer
services tool and help passengers in real time when they are in the airport
environment
• Train operations staff. Actively encourage people to call Gatwick out while
at the airport

10. Using Twitter as a proactive customer services tool

11. Our round the clock Twitter support really kicked in
during the pre Xmas snow disruptions
21 November - 4082 followers
14 December - 9498 followers
20 December - 15,440 followers
(Currently - 21k followers)
At one point we were called out 300x an hour

12. Selection of tweets from 18-22 December

13. Selection of tweets from 18-22 December

14. Our efforts were recognised - comparison of
Twitter key words Dec 2010
Source - Scoutlabs:
The word ‘thanks’
mentioned in 16% of
Gatwick and 1% of
Heathrow tweets.
The word ‘chaos’
mentioned in 35% of
Heathrow but 9% of
Gatwick tweets

15. Moving Twitter outside marketing - to do this
you need....
• Training sessions on background, etiquette (in particular the idea of right
first time)
• The tools to allow them to access it: 1 - A team management system (either
hootsuite or cotweet), 2 - the right IT (e.g a lot of corporates still use IE6,
block social media)
• A commitment to make it work, as you can easily fall down after announcing
it
• Some idea of what you do with the output you get....
• A response flow chart and a guide on what different team members should
and shouldn’t answer

16. A £1 billion investment
invariably has a certain amount
of disruption - how can we use
social media to communicate
what is going on
Next challenge

17. Our solution - work with the physical
environment of the airport
• Use the construction hoardings as information points (they are not only
unsightly - it is dead space)
• Bring in an interactive element
• Use barcodes....
• ....but not QR codes
• Our solution was to work with Stickybits - 2D codes that look like the ones
you see in supermarkets. Any kind of content can be attached to them

18. Giant barcodes - Currently there are around half a dozen landside.
Airside codes coming soon

19. “We need a way to
allow passengers to
feed back on airport
facilities using mobile /
social media”
Final stage of the
brief

20. Solution - work with Qype
• There are two ways we could have approached this. Build our own ratings
system - problem of impartiality and also retailer relations
• Or alternatively - like most large public retail spaces there were reviews
already in existence, especially through Yelp and Qype. Both have an API
that can be pulled in
• We chose Qype, more European based. 20 million visitors per month through
local listings / SEO and mobile applications

21. Integration of Qype. Leave reviews (good and bad) and they appear directly on the Gatwick
website

22. And there is more....
• We are working with Internal comms to see how online social tools can be
integrated
• We set up the first European feed on Instagram
• We have built a Tumblr site, which will act as a visual showcase
• Use of Gowalla / Foursquare
• We support retailers and airlines on an ad-hoc basis. For example, when Air
Berlin came to Gatwick, a Bavarian oompah band played versions of 20
popular classics and recorded personalised versions for travel influencers,
bloggers

23. How is all this used?
• Every week we share: Twitter topics, sentiment, key tweets
• Every month we produce a comparison vs other airports
• We also share all Qype reviews
• A summary is passed up to senior management level and actioned. Social
media provides the senior management team with a radar of passenger
sentiment

24. Why is this campaign
different?

25. It treated social media as a platform,
and not a channel

26. It joined up the dots - and
made / makes a difference
Text

27. It is given time to work - it is consistent and
long-term

28. It is social in the real sense, it is two way

29. Thanks for your time!
• Am on Instagram, Twitter, Skype as dirktherabbit
• Blog very occasionally at liesdamnedliesstatistics
• Rabbit - www.therabbitagency.com, Twitter @therabbitagency