Tiger Airways has been slammed by CASA  for breaches in safety and the media has been reporting it in depth to the  public;  saying its right not to fly if its not safe. Tiger has had a poor record in terms of communication and have made it worse by not using Social Media when it could be very effective. And so, if you aren't going to use Social Media or pay attention to it, then when the incidents like this occur things are going to go pear shaped even more quickly and more deeply. We investigated how Social Media was used by Tiger Airways to manage this situation and came to some fascinating conclusions.

[blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/#!/tigerairwaysaus/status/87732692145291264"]

Firstly we listened to what was occurring and in the last week 3,712 Tweets were sent with only three of those being sent by @TigerAirwaysAUS. So why then do they have a twitter account and what are they communicating to their 3,704 followers? Well with only 303 Tweets since 16th June 09; Twitter doesn't seem to be an integrated part of the communication strategy nor seen as a enabler towards Tiger's business objectives. Tiger aren't using it to communicate with their customers and they aren't using it to manage customer service issues -  they have not been responding to service issues in this medium for a long time.   They certainly haven't even taken the step to engage on Twitter. They may be listening but are they hearing what their customers are saying? Not on the evidence we see.

So then we had a look at Facebook with their 2,708 "Fans".

We discovered numerous customer complaints that weren't addressed by Tiger on their Facebook page. A few examples below:

We also looked at the Facebook Buzz (i.e. key conversations - the thickness of the lines show the association of commonly mentioned terms). Notice all the customer issues.

Summary

Clearly Tiger Airways isn't using Facebook or Twitter for communicating with its customers nor its stakeholders through this Public Relations disaster...and this was the case even prior to the grounding by CASA. Tiger Airways have missed the opportunity that Social Media presents business. Further more, when you delve into the data you find that the social channels are inundated with unresolved and failed customer service issues. Here we have a case of no clear strategy for Social Business and I'd argue there is an uncommunicative senior management team as it relates to the use of Traditional and Social Media. All compounded in poorly executed Social Tactics...and who cares at Tiger if they aren't even listening? The best advice for Tiger would be to shut down their Social Media presence until such time they had an clear Social Business Strategy (i.e. clear business goals) supported by well executed Social Business Tactics!

Finally there is a lot of data in the social web for Tiger Airways to take action, improve their customer satisfaction, and build better relationships before the grounding. Tiger Airways didn't use the data they had prior to the CASA intervention and now the landing will be even harder because of it. To quote Ron Ploof from 'Read this First - An Executives Guide to New Media" - social data is a goldmine but if you don't extract the gold its just a hill like any other.

Appendix: Further details

Negative Tweets

Tiger Airways Last few Tweets

Twitter Word Cloud

Last Few Tweets related to Tiger Airways

Spreadsheet of the Last 500 Tweets-content-2011-07-04

Notes to Analysis:

• One week data in Twitter
• One Month Facebook data
• Boolean: tiger AND NOT (wood OR jungle OR play OR goatie)
• country au, sg, hk, nz

@michae1Green