Plane Conversations

There is a lot of buzz these days about “social”, evidenced by the fact that anytime a topic is brought up online with the words “social” or “social media” all of us who claim to be social tweet it out. 

So what is social and anti social about the experience of traveling by air? 

A good definition of social in this context of travel is “allowing people to meet and interact with others in a friendly way”.

Conversely, Encarta defines antisocial as “hostile or indifferent to the comfort or needs of other members of a community or society as a whole”

So here’s a question for those of you who travel routinely in the airline system: 

Would you rate the experience of airline travel social or antisocial based on the definitions presented above? Is the experience friendly or hostile?

Maybe hostile is too strong of a word to use to describe traveling by airline but “indifferent to the comfort or needs…” may accurately define the experience.

As I queue up in line to take off my shoes, unload my I-Pad bag, get searched, wanded and body scanned I don’t feel real social. The weary and worn out road warriors who spend valuable hours in the waiting areas of terminal buildings most likely don’t feel social either.

Compare the experience of airline travel against the experience of traveling in a business jet or even in a small private airplane.

Come hang out in the lobby of a fixed based operation, a terminal for private flights, and see the difference in the traveler’s demeanor over what you see at a busy hub airport.

We see it every day in our business. Smiling people passing through the lobby departing to go on vacation or a business trip, or getting ready to go home from a trip, knowing they will be back home soon. Knowing the experience they are about to have will be positive from beginning to end.

I grew up flying in small airplanes and some of my fondest memories of travel were the flights riding up front with a father who was a corporate pilot. The passengers in the back of the aircraft most always enjoyed the trip with my father smoothly flying them to the destination. Even when the weather did not cooperate he somehow still made it a good experience.

So what’s it worth to you to have a social versus antisocial travel experience?  

Is there a monetary value difference in the two experiences?

Business aviation has taken a beating in the past two years.  While we are now seeing some signs of recovery, we must remember that those signs do not constitute prosperity. We can blame industry difficulties on the government or on the economy, but the reality is that we need to quit following the old business models. In many areas, we are doing things today just as we have for the past 30 years.

If we look to the technology sector of our economy as a possible success story to emulate, we see a constant flow of innovation in the market. Computing technology gets not only faster and more productive by the day, but it also gets cheaper. Social Technology has taken on a life of its own with changes happening faster than even the social media gurus can keep up with.

Those of us in aviation know that we cannot change or innovate as fast as the technology sector of this economy. Or can we?

When it comes to the aircraft design and regulation compliance that make our industry safer, admittedly we cannot go any faster than the government allows. New aircraft designs are also limited by the allocation of capital and have long cycles from initial investment to development to payoff. The tech sector can crank out new smart phones every six months, but we can’t just crank out new jets that fast.

Aircraft design and safety compliance timing may be out of our control, but that should not stop us from innovating.

Innovation starts with conversations. Doc Searls coined the term “the market is conversations” in his 1999 book The Cluetrain Manifesto.  With consumers self-aggregating and expressing intentions online, why can’t we engage in the conversations and meet those intentions?

We need to expand our market by engaging the larger audience of travelers in conversations about the value proposition of business aviation and even leisure travel by private aircraft. It starts online these days and ultimately moves to face-to-face contact.

We also need to challenge our market and our industry to start conversations on how to deliver business aviation at a reduced cost. The solutions must come from the entire supply chain, with everyone involved in business aviation as a part of the solution.

I have yet to hear anyone say they would like to go back to riding on the airlines after experiencing travel on a private aircraft.  What I have heard, hundreds of times, is that they can’t afford what we offer; so, they grudgingly go back for more of the misery of air travel by mass transit.

What are we going to do about it?

Anybody interested in providing the solution?

 The DOT’s Future of Aviation Advisory Committee recently met and comments  made in the meeting  indicate that small market airports are not in the airlines’ future plans – at least not the large carriers.  In fact, if not for the DOT’s Essential Air Service program, many cities currently receiving airline service would be in the no- airline zone. You can’t blame the airlines for not wanting to lose money; and, the current airline business model doesn’t work to serve smaller cities without government subsidies.

So, if the airlines cannot provide the solution, who can?

With fewer service options and more time spent processing through the system, the time to travel between small cities by airline often exceeds the time it takes to drive. Why fly when the drive costs less and doesn’t take much, if any, more time? Because flying often doesn’t make sense with the current options available, more people are opting for other means of transportation, drawing resources away from small airports.

What those airports and their communities don’t know today, but could know, are the true travel intentions of the people they are trying to serve. The airports must find out who, when and where.  In other words, they must identify the demand. 

Identifying the demand could be as simple as finding physicians in a community who are all attending an AMA convention.  This is just an example of the concept of group-buying, using an eight-passenger jet or a 30-seat regional airliner for the day to meet the specific demand to connect a group directly to another city.  Other examples could be alumni traveling to sporting events, golfers going to a new course or hunters traveling to a new lodge, etc.  If there is known demand, then supply will surely meet it. So, how do we find the demand?

Can Social Networking be a tool small communities can use to solve their air transportation problems through aggregating demand for travel?

Yes, it can.   Business Aviation, including small and large air charter operators, and small regional airlines, are in the perfect position to solve those air transportation problems.  We are sitting on a highly flexible (mobile), underutilized and diverse fleet of aircraft. Travel needs could be met on demand and by the seat with the right knowledge.  This may not provide a low fare airline solution that everyone thinks they want in their hometown; but, it could provide time-efficient and point-to-point travel at a reasonable price.

Isn’t that what we really want anyway? 

“Group Buying” was an idea that first surfaced during the “dot com” boom and ultimately failed to build any momentum.  The idea is again gaining popularity in the era of social media where scalability can be introduced as aggregation cost diminish on applications such as Facebook and Twitter.

Ditch the gatekeeper, axe the marketers, lose the spam.

My first reaction is to find the most unsavory business transactions today and eliminate all the unnecessary middle men and their costs, gateways, noise pollution, and inefficiencies.

Why can’t there be one cell phone store where I can buy anything for any mobile device? Why do I have to pay to use my credit card and pay to not use my credit card? Why am I still treated like a terrorist precisely when I am doing everything that I can to avoid terrorists?

There are some glimmers on the horizon.

Applications such as SocialBuy, Groupon, and Living Social, use their social media platforms that offer vouchers for steep discounts on a variety of goods, once a minimum threshold of consumers is reached.  People have an economic incentive to promote products in their social network (on Facebook and Twitter) in order to reach those thresholds more rapidly and consistently.

Product Networks?

Suppose the group buying experience could aggregate packages of products.  Strategic products would then be aggregated as  ”A Network of Products” that together increase net value.  Yes, you heard me…a ‘combination of products’ with Twitter followers.  A zip car, a movie ticket, Segway rental, and a dinner coupon could be aggregated into an entertainment / shopping package.

This is not so strange.

Apple’s enduring success is very much a model of commercial social aggregation. Nobody can compete with an iPhone without also offering iTunes, iMovie, iPad, and all the social trappings of the iStore.  Perhaps Google, with its social commercial network can compete resulting in a duopoly.  Group buying can empower the smaller players and bust monopolies in an infinite array of combinations.

Why not air travel?

The door-to-door travel time and social cost to fly between two small cities, say, 500 miles apart using commercial airlines is greater than just driving. There is no other alternative, sans high-speed rail, and the economic result is that the two cities remain small with very little new commerce or diffusion of new ideas that air travel benefits a region.  People just don’t travel much between, say, Omaha NE and Cheyenne, WY.

Yet, small city pairs within 500 miles have strong extended family roots, migration patterns, and social network density.  It would be relatively easy to offer Group Buying on a 20-25 seat private airplane for less than the cost of driving; and in 1/10 the time!

The travel package could include ground transportation, shopping coupons, and maybe even a A zip car, a movie ticket, Segway rental, and a dinner coupon could be aggregated into an entertainment / shopping package.

Every small city economic development agency in the country should be in this business of building social networks and matching them with product networks between other small city pairs…

Thanks to Forbes.com and Managing Editor Carl Lavin for giving business and private aviation a voice on their site.

Two weeks ago, Forbes.com started a new blog site called Wheels Up  to give a forum for conversations to those of us in the business of business aviation and to private aviators as well.

I was fortunate to be asked to contribute posts along with others including Plane Conversations and CFMCharter friends Clint White , Susan Friedenberg and new friends Jeffrey Reich,  and Jeremy R.C. Cox.

Other contributors so far include passionate private aviators Pierre de Fermor, Michelle C. Torres-Grant, and Carl Lavin weighing in from Forbes.com perspective.

This is great for our industry to get the opportunity to share our stories and engage in conversations with the Forbes readers about the value proposition of business and private aviation. Maybe we will no longer be the best kept secret?

The social media conscious people in our industry need to support Forbes efforts by promoting this new site with Tweets, Facebook and Linked In sharing of the posts, and most importantly, by engaging in the conversation through comments on the site. As we generate traffic and interest, and bring the conversation to the traveling public, we will all benefit.

From looking at the site daily it appears that we are getting some good traction and this is just the beginning.

Happy Fathers Day to all of you who are Dads. Being a father is the most important job we have! 

Have a great rest of the weekend.

Over the past 28 years I have been a student of business aviation. Continually gaining new knowledge and applying that knowledge to better our business is not optional: it is necessary.  Born out of my frustration with Business Aviation’s inability to get its message and value proposition to the market more effectively, I became a student of Social Media a year ago.

Those of us in Business Aviation have not done a good job of telling our story to the business traveler.  Mainstream media has not done a good job at telling our story, either. The biased filters of media seldom get the quotes right or capture the essence of the true value proposition of Business Aviation. It is much easier to overlook the real purpose and to talk about the glitz and glamour of a private jet. The efficiency and productivity message doesn’t get the ratings like glitz, glamour and controversy.     

Business and Private Aviation is supported by and made up of a handful of big businesses and thousands of small businesses across this country. Those businesses operate out of the 5500 public airports in the US, most of which are small airports providing a vital link to their communities.

Small businesses and small airports have never been able to tell their stories because they did not have the advertising and PR budgets of their big business / big airport counterparts.

In the age of social media, those small businesses in private and business aviation services can now speak up and be heard. They can communicate their value to the market without filters. More importantly, they can hear from the market of frustrated travelers out there blogging and tweeting their travel misery every day.

Those who listen to that frustration and develop an understanding of the broken system can possibly even meet the market of travelers with a much more efficient solution – a solution that even makes travel a pleasant experience.   

All of that opportunity has come to our doorstep because of the advent of Social Media.

Over the past year I have seen private and business aviation wake up to the power to communicate with the market through Social Media.

It is now up to us to take what we are learning and properly apply that knowledge for the benefit of the traveler and our industry. When we do that, everyone wins!

My father is a forester.  At one time, his chief role in his company was to evaluate a stand of timber and negotiate with the landowner for the rights to that timber.  Those kinds of deals weren’t made by men in suits in conference rooms or over the phone.  They were made by men in dusty boots on the front porch over a cup of coffee.  Contracts were agreed upon with a handshake before pen was ever put to paper.  There was a protocol for making those deals and, if you rushed it, you lost it. 

The landowner might not have all the latest facts, figures and price indexes for whatever hardwood he was trying to sell, but he wanted a fair price for his resource.  To be sure that he was getting the best price and was being treated fairly, he had to know who he was dealing with.  He might have known a guy who knew a guy, but, even then, he wanted to make the judgement for himself.  And he made that judgement sitting on the front porch drinking a cup of coffee with the potential buyer.

I don’t have land with timber on it.  To be honest, I don’t have a front porch to speak of, either.  But when I’m spending money, I want to know who I’m spending it with and I don’t think I’m unusual.  As a front porch for consumers and vendors alike, Social Media helps me do that.  I tell people regularly to check our commercial site to see what we do; but, to see who we are, check this blog, our Facebook pages and our Tweets.  You’ll see the issues that are important to us – aviation industry issues and advances, marketing and human resources articles, environmental issues and hockey.  (Hey, I’m a fan and since I post many of our updates, well…..)

We can’t shake hands and or make eye contact over a blog, a tweet or a status update; however, with continued exchanges, we can get to know one another.  As a customer, we can watch how vendors treat other customers.  We can see the rate and the quality of interaction.  As a vendor, we can see customers’ interests and viability.  If either party is presenting counterfeit social currency, they won’t be able to hide it for long.

Sure, we can teleconference, video conference, read brochures and websites; however, those things tell us only what their authors want us to know.  By reviewing a vendor or even a customer’s social currency, we can see how closely their actions match their words.  We may not be literally looking each other in the eye, but by exploring a person or company’s social presence, we will find evidence of the each other’s ethics, activity level, responsiveness and global awareness.  Social media gives us all the opportunity to either credit or discredit a company’s claims based on information we find in the company’s own social media offerings and on reviews written by their customers.

The Web of today and the Deep Web right around the corner offer fewer skeleton-hiding closets.  The wide open platform gives consumers and vendors the opportunity to see each other as they are and as they’d like to be seen.  We still may know a guy who knows a guy.  Social Media gives us the chance to look each other in the virtual eye before we make the deal - even without dusty boots or cups of coffee.

Every time someone posts something online the context of their content reveals an intent. Intentions have become transparent and discernment of intent is becoming the wisdom of crowds.

The aggregation of consumer conversations enabled by technology has fueled awareness of market methods and intents. Consumers have found influence and have begun to “opt out” of the old methods created by old market methods of intent to capture and sell.

Social technology has created a transparency of intent. Intent is a relational attribute that reveals motive. The “markets of conversations” are no longer motivated by old methods used by the markets over the last 40 years. Doc Searls says “The Intention Economy is built around more than transactions. Conversations matter. So do relationships. So do reputation, authority and respect. Those virtues, however, are earned by sellers (as well as buyers) and not just “branded” by sellers on the minds of buyers like the symbols of ranchers burned on the hides of cattle.”

A Brands Letter of Intent

A letter of intent or LOI is a document outlining an agreement between two or more parties before the agreement is finalized. Such agreements may be for employment, acquisitions, mergers, purchases of services or products. Agreements which aim to specify the intents of parties engaged in a relationship for specific purposes.

The purposes of a LOI may be:

• to clarify the key points of a complex or simple transaction for the convenience of the parties
• to declare officially that the parties are now engaged with an intent implied or specifically spelled out
• to offer safeguards for when the relationship collapses during an engagement with intent

A LOI may also be referred to as a memorandum of understanding (MOU), term sheet or discussion sheet. The different terms show different styles, but do not show any difference under law. Social letters of intent exist when and where buyers and sellers engage on-line through the exchange of information and later a transaction which has certain expectations of delivery.

Social Agreements Represent LOI’s

When people engage with other people or entire organizations on-line there is an implied social agreement represented within the communications. The social agreement may be in response to an inquiry, a comment on posted content or an intent to investigate or take action from an ad or marketing message. The social agreement may also simply be a response to a need or an exchange of communications centric to topical discussions.

Given the reach of social technology and the engagement of markets, buyers and sellers, the underlying social agreement is similar to the traditional letter of intent. While social agreements are not legal instruments the expectations of fulfillment by both parties remain the same as if they were legally agreements.

The very nature of social technology and the emerging dynamics are raising people’s expectation to fulfill implied intents contained in context with the content (communications). It is clear that traditional marketing and advertising methods are being rejected because the intent of such methods are not what buyers expect. Today’s buyers expect honesty, integrity, responsiveness, performance and respect for their time, attention and intentions.

Cluttering buyers time, attention and relevant intentions with irrelevant ads and slick marketing messages does not show respect. Treating buyers like cattle waiting to be herded does not show respect. The currency of communications represents the value of ones intent to fulfill or fail to fulfill the intent of a social agreement. Failure to fulfill a social agreement means the buyers currency, both in the form of money and communications, will not follow you rather both will be spent and shared elsewhere.

Social letters of intent are not created by or from the supplier rather from the buyer. To ignore or not fulfill these intents means you lose the buyers currency and that of their “friends”. That represents a return, or lack thereof, from this thing called social media.

Over the years of growing our business I have had the opportunity to meet many airport directors in communities looking for ways to improve air service to their airports. My brother runs an airline in the western US that provides service to many communities through the Essential Air Service (EAS) program funded by the DOT. He has probably been through 100’s of presentations from airports and their support organizations – chambers of commerce, economic development boards and city governments.

All of these airports and the communities they serve want good air service. Why?

They consider air service as a necessary ingredient for business and economic development. When you can connect to the rest of the world by air you can bring business in to your community and create jobs and prosperity. When you are disconnected from the rest of the world you lose out and no one wants to lose out. 

Over the past two years the situation has not gotten better for small airports.

In fact it has gotten worse because airlines have pulled out of many small markets either entirely or they have reduced service to the point that it no longer offers any convenience to the business traveler. Because of the geographic and demographic rules of EAS subsidies, many small airports don’t qualify for the subsidy. They are just a little too close to another airport with airline service but too far away to be convenient. Or they are not quite large enough as a market.  

So far no one has come up with a real solution that fixes the problem of the demand for convenient air travel at a reasonable price in small markets.

Small airlines like Cape Air are doing a good job of filling some of the holes but there are still a lot of airports looking for solutions. Charter companies like my company are glad to pick you up at a small airport and take you anywhere. Our problem is price. We are still too expensive for the average traveler.

As I have sat in on meetings over the years I usually hear the field of dreams story. “Build it and they will come” or in this case “show up and fly and we will fill up your aircraft with happy paying passengers”. If that was the case then why aren’t the airlines showing up and fighting for those passengers?

One of the major issues I see is that no one can really tell you or I today where people really want to go. At best, over the years, consultants to the airline and airports put together a marketing study based on DOT statistics showing Origin and Destination (O&D) traffic flow between cities based on airlines published data. With some statistical tweaking the consultant shows that a quantity of people in a community are flying to or from some close by hub airport and they would all rather leave from the home field if they just could. Those stats rarely translate into a reality for the airline or the home airport because the stats don’t correctly indentify the traveler’s true intentions.

So the question to ask is how we identify the true intentions of travelers, to really know when and where they want to go, and what it is worth to them for someone to meet their intentions.

If, in a perfect world with perfect knowledge at our fingertips, we could reach that point of knowledge could we then meet those intentions with the fleet of aircraft available in this country?

Change gears with me now and think about what is happening in the world of social media: 400 million and counting on Facebook, people tweeting every minute of the day, geo-location technology that knows where I tweet or text from, linked in profiles, and applications like TripIt that tell everyone where I am going and how I am getting there. In the past few weeks Facebook has gotten slapped for their use of the information they have been collecting on all of us, but at the end of the day I predict that we will not slow down telling everyone else everything about us. Privacy or no privacy we seem more than willing to let the world know just about anything.  

How could communities and small airports use the power of this information from Social Media to match traveler’s intentions to the supply of travel services? Could they build their very own communities online with the purposes of sharing travel intentions between travelers?  If so they could have the real knowledge of who, where, when and how much as opposed to the statistics that don’t seem to mesh with reality?

Something to think about isn’t it!

The Regional Airline Association held its annual convention in Milwaukee this week. I have been to three RAA conventions over the years even though our company is not a member of RAA. The conventions I have attended were well run, and had good representation by all of the regional airlines in the US and regionals outside the US.

Of interest  to me this year at RAA was a panel discussion during the Wednesday lunch hour with the topic “Flying Above the Social Media Fray” and an events description of the discussion “How does your company rate its Social Media Score Card? Hear the aviation experts discuss the hows and whys and answer your questions.”

Among the group of four moderators was Benet Wilson with Aviation Week, (http://twitter.com/AvWeekBenet - follow her on Twitter),  who was also a moderator at last years NBAA Convention that I attended. Benet is the queen of social media in aviation and a true apostle of all things social in aviation. Benet is part of a small group of journalists and aviators who led the way for the rest of us to jump into the game.  The impact of the social media forum at NBAA has continued to reverberate through the companies in attendance of that panel discussion.

It will be interesting to see if there will be follow on development of social media in the membership of RAA. Will the top management of the airlines allow and empower their employees to use social media?

Based on the little I see from the Regional Airlines in social media space, my guess is that many of the airlines have not gotten too far into the tools of social media to communicate to their market.

Through looking at some of the Tweets from the convention I did notice that ASA, a subsidiary of SkyWest, Inc, now has a blog site. http://www.flyasa.com/prod/blog/. That’s a good start.  None of the other large regional airlines seem to have any social media presence at all? Am I missing something or someone?

Regional Airlines take a beating in the press and from their customers for many reasons, some may be legitimate and some not, including service and reliability issues.  These companies are missing a great opportunity to humanize their image by allowing their people to come out front in social media and talk to the people they fly. Social media is about people dealing with people – not companies dealing with companies.

If the airlines would free their people to communicate through social media, relationships would be built, problems would get solved, and maybe even innovation would happen. The rest of the business world is starting to understand this.  Maybe the airlines will figure this out?  Right now it seems they are more in a slumber state than a waking up state when it comes to social media.