Another great archeological find brought to you by the Onion News Network.

In a blog post at Gadling (no relation to me..) entitled “Airlines and social media: dialogue waiting to happen”, Tom Johansmeyer discusses the current situation regarding airlines’ use of social media, which in general has not been stellar.

He echoes many of the sentiments I wrote about last week but adds that these new channels are just another way for customers to complain about how miserable their experience with a specific airline is.

In general, the conclusion is, that airlines have not been as proactive in participating in social media beyond the “deal tweet” and occasional service update as one might have expected.

We would agree that any business participating in social media should not see this as yet another marketing channel. Of course, it has strong marketing potential but it’s fully a two-way communications (and in our case mutli-dimensional) channel and the business has to be on top of what’s written in blogs, Facebook, tweets and other social media outlets and respond as quickly as possible.

Social media is nothing like traditional media outlets (e.g. radio, TV, etc.) – it is  live, real-time communication that requires active and dedicated participation. If a business is not fully committed to this kind of interaction, social media might hurt more then it helps.

Gad Barnea – CEO – FlyMiwok, Inc.

Over the past couple of years, airlines have become some of the most savvy users of social media, even though they were slow and clumsy to jump on the bandwagon initially.

Specifically Southwest, JetBlue and Virgin have been leading the trend with blogs, high Twitter activity and Facebook fan pages. Earlier this month, JetBlue (@jetbluecheeps) and United (@UnitedAirlines) had a special promotion for their Twitter followers offering early, almost real-time alerts on special deals. Also, Virgin’s in flight WIFI allows for in-flight social networking to the point where they can deal with in-flight customer issues in real-time:

For example, we recently received a message in-flight from a guest who was having trouble flagging down the in-flight team to order a meal. We sent a message to the plane and alerted the crew – and he was served.”

Although we keep following and are inspired by what various airlines are doing with social networking – we see their approach to social networking as a “Hub & Spoke” approach where the airline connects with the users through social networking and the users can even sometimes connect with the airline as well – but not with each other in the context of their air travel – at least, we haven’t yet seen an airline offer this model.

FlyMiwok, of course, is not an airline – we represent on-demand operators and has a Twitter (@flymiwok) and Facebook presence and this blog, but because of the on-demand nature of the business model and the community aspect that’s baked right into our booking process, user-to-user social networking (as well as social networking between us and the user) is an organic part of the booking process itself. This makes the entire process and the relationship much more dynamic than most other uses of social networking we’ve seen.

With the FlyMiwok reservation system (currently in RC “Release-Candidate” 1 testing – expected to go live in 2-3 weeks.. – so stay tuned!), users can invite FlyMiwok users and Facebook friends directly to join them on their flights through Facebook connect; they can tweet about their flights – right through the booking system itself – they can even review other members’ Linkedin information (if they provide that information in their profile) right from the FlyMiwok “Community” page. 

Of course, we will also interact with users through hub and spoke model directly as well – we’ll do anything to give our users the most responsive user experience possible.

Gad Barnea – CEO – FlyMiwok, Inc.