Launch of @United Falls Short

In March 2011, United and Continental Airlines began planning their merger into United Continental Airlines.  The official merger launched on May 18, complete with new signage and a “Customer Day One” campaign at Chicago O’Hare to bring excitement to the day.  As with most “change” and “transition”, there were bound to be bumps in the road along the way.  As blogger "Flying With Fish" reported here: http://bit.ly/ki6Viu there is a major social media oversight in their planning.

Historically, United Airlines and Continental have successfully used their @UnitedAirlines and @Continental accounts to quickly respond to customer tweets, promote giveaways and new flight information, and promote their public relations pieces such as their earth day giveaway.  The impressive and shocking information is that @UnitedAirlines had 195,972 followers and @Continental had 145,884 followers.  Now what was the blunder?  Neither @UnitedAirlines or @Continental are being used post-merger.  Rather than renaming one of the two accounts previously held by the two airlines (as easy as adjusting a setting in Twitter), on May 18, a new account @United was launched.  That’s right, 341,856 followers left on the table. Twitter would not allow the accounts to be merged, thus, a decision would have had to be made.   Rather than making that difficult decision of selecting which account to update with a new name, United Continental chose to avoid the conflict altogether. 

Maybe it isn’t fair to say “341,856” followers were left on the table, maybe a more accurate number would be “195,972” or “145,884”.  Additionally, since the launch of @United, neither of the previous accounts have been deactivated or heavily utilized to transition customers to follow @United.  Because this is a “fresh” situation, it’s difficult to say exactly what organizational error caused this, but here are a couple speculations:

1.    Lack of Consistency.  I don’t want to undermine that mergers are hard, but the twitter failure does not align with the plan.  United Continental has released plans to merge the two airlines down to the new on-board beer selection and coffee lines, but failed to integrate a comprehensive plan for their Twitter presence.  Align your social media presence with your corporate image, if you are going for a seamless transition, plan for it. 

2.    Someone didn’t speak up.  Between the two marketing, public relations, or customer relations departments-someone (maybe lots of people) did not speak up to point out the time, money, & effort it took to reach 140,000+ followers for each airline.  How could this have been avoided?  Beyond the use of common sense, it is important that especially during times of great change, open communication and constant feedback are being sought within the organization.  Maybe the “someone” that foresaw this blunder was an intern, not sure if his opinion would matter…make sure that intern feels empowered to speak up @United. 

Marketing-wise, there are two things that could have or could still be done:

1.    Pick one!  Pretty self-explanatory, but pick one to change the name and launch a campaign to the second one with an apology for the inconvenience & find a way to promote-now that choice isn’t really an option-do #2.

2.    Soft Transition.  Once the decision to launch @United was made, it is wrong to assume 341,856 followers will move in one tweet.  You need to launch a campaign to move your followers over time.  This isn’t going to happen overnight and will take some work-but not nearly as much as finding 340,000 brand new followers. 

Although Social Media is a relatively new concern during mergers, it is no less important in establishing a new company culture and online image.  United Continental can still save something of the situation, but they need a plan and action to start soon.  Would you have made the same decision as United Continental?  Or, would you make the same decision with a different plan of action? 

-Kelsey Umbarger