Winging it - Ryanair and blogging
The increasing trend of corporate blogging has led to some interesting questions being asked of the internet as a comms tool.
As press statements go, Ryanair’s dismissal of bloggers as “lunatics” and “idiots” will take some beating.
That was the budget airline’s terse response after some of its staff got into a slanging match with blogger Jason Roe, a web developer who posted an article on his blog two weeks ago after finding what he mistakenly thought was a loophole on Ryanair’s website that allowed customers to book free flights.
It was, in fact, just a minor bug and did not allow free flights to be booked, but in return for his innocent error, Roe faced a volley of vitriol from Ryanair staff members who lambasted him on the section of his blog where visitors can post comments. He was branded “an idiot and a liar!” and chastised as someone who must lead a “pathetic life” by commentators assuming the monikers of ‘Ryanair Staff’.
It prompted a futher, official statement from Ryanair taking responsibility for the comments but offering no apology: “Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again,” the airline’s statement said. It concluded with the flourish: “Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.”
The Dublin-based airline’s statement came as no surprise to Jon Brown, head of strategy at Paversmith. “The truth is that Ryanair are different to the rest of us: they make a virtue of being institutionally rude,” he says. “The company’s institutional rudeness carries a subliminal message for customers: we don’t care what you think about us because we’re so f**king cheap you’ll use us anyway.”
Condemnation
Ryanair’s attitude has invited a plethora of comments wherever the story has been published – most in condemnation of the airline; Roe’s blog, where the row began, has attracted almost 500 comments at the time of writing, many from fellow bloggers offering their support and rallying against the company.
But despite the negative tone to most of the coverage, as a PR tactic and a brand proposition, Brown insists it is “genius”. “With a few judiciously chosen words, Ryanair get acres of virally-driven coverage which reinforces their position as a provider of flights so cheap they don’t even need to worry about being nice to people. In the current climate, where we’re all seeking cost savings in our personal lives, it’s just brilliant.”
Iain Bruce, editorial director at Revolver PR, admits he too has had a sneaking admiration for Ryanair’s brazen approach to PR (he loved the airline’s recent story about potentially charging its passengers £1 to use the toilet on their flights). Ryanair’s brash approach can even seem “refreshing”, he says, in the traditional print and broadcast media, where safe, dry corporate statements dominate. But he believes the company hasn’t grasped “what it is dealing with online” and thinks “insulting a constituency of bloggers numbering millions of people who take what they do very personally” is a dangerous move: “The web is a completely different animal.”
Bruce believes that judged in traditional broadcast and print terms, Ryanair’s remarks would soon be brushed off as “a throwaway line that will make a one minute piece on the Today programme perhaps, and will cause a giggle, a little controversy, a great name-check for your brand, and then it’ll be gone.” Not so online, he says: “Things appear online for ever. Thousands of people will visit this blogger’s site and hundreds of people will link to it – it will hang around the internet and be seen by people searching Google for that company for years. They’re going to have to go to a search engine optimisation company and spend a fair bit of money to change that.”
Rob Brown, managing director of Staniforth and an author on social media, is not so much concerned with Ryanair’s official stance – “it was bang on brand” – but the ease with which Ryanair’s staff assumed the company’s identity and installed themselves as the brand’s mouthpieces. “The issue is that their lack of internal controls allowed someone to use the blog moniker ‘Ryanair Staff’ without any control or monitoring,” he says. “The outcome could have been much worse. If companies aren’t even monitoring how their corporate identity is being used they are asking for trouble.”
Interact
Sandra McDowell, a partner at Amaze, believes staff taking the initiative to interact with consumers online and through social media channels is, generally speaking, something to be celebrated. “Allowing staff members to speak openly about the brand – within appropriate guidelines – and to take part in conversations is a powerful way of breaking down the corporate barrier, revealing the personalities behind the brand and using the human face to form more meaningful relationships and make customer’s opinion valued.”
However, McDowell stresses that there needs to be a clear understanding across all staff participating in online engagement that they are representing the brand through their comments and actions. “It is imperative that best practice guidelines are always put in place to ensure that staff don’t discredit the company or reveal sensitive information in a very public, traceable medium,” she says.
For Ryanair’s staff, there were clearly no “best practice guidelines” to follow.
And according to Rob Brown, even if companies are controlling how their brands are represented when they enter into discussions on the web, they must remember it is still a public forum: “Don’t say anything on a blog or on Twitter that you wouldn’t be happy to have broadcast on the ten o’clock news,” he warns. “It could end up there.”