Travel Managers Discuss Pitfalls And Promise Of Social Networks

London - Travel managers who have created official communities on enterprise social networks like Yammer generally are fulsome in their praise of the resultant engagement with travelers and other key stakeholders. However, new technologies create new hazards, and an unexpected challenge has arisen from employees launching unofficial travel communities on the same networks. Jointly presenting last month here at the Business Travel Show in London, AstraZeneca travel service regional business partner Louise Kilgannon and Continental Tyres global category manager for travel and mobility Rüdiger Bruss both said they have to figure out how to deal with such unofficial communities.

"One of our employees launched a business travel community which is used to share tips on things like restaurants," Bruss told attendees. "It looks official but some of the information is dead wrong."

Kilgannon told a similar story. "We found four nonofficial travel sites," she said. "Some of them are giving really bad information."

Finding the appropriate response is particularly tricky for Bruss because his company does not have an official community for travelers; the one he runs is for the 40 Continental employees worldwide with travel management duties. "If you're not doing it, someone else will, and they will run something contrary to your travel program," he said. "We would close it down if we had our own travel community, but we don't, so that’s high on our agenda."

AstraZeneca has a different attitude. "We don't close them down because we are meant to have open communities," Kilgannon said. "Instead, we go on to those communities and say, 'This is wrong information; come and join our community where the information is correct.' "

The official traveler community was the launch community for AstraZeneca's version of Yammer. The company has 22,000 active Yammer users and the official traveler community has 500 active followers, "but many more look at it," said Kilgannon, who has lead responsibility within the travel team for managing the community, a task that takes her approximately one hour each week. An alert arrives in her email inbox every time a post is made, and she posts regularly herself.

The travel team uses Yammer to broadcast such travel advisories as weather problems. It also is an internal public relations tool, used, for example, to gather and forward positive comments from travelers. Another crucial function is to act as a channel for criticism. Kilgannon told the audience it is important to acknowledge negative comments and promise to investigate. Often the complaints prove misplaced. One example is a traveler who criticized AstraZeneca's car rental provider. A brief investigation revealed the critic had not signed up for the provider's priority program, which instantly would have improved the level of service received.

Kilgannon said a lot of thought goes into the communication style on Yammer. "We use a very specific tone with our travelers," she said. "It's shorter, snappier and more friendly. We are trying to capture that coffee-line chat. We try to come up with light-hearted approaches. For example, we provided a jargon-buster because one of our booking agents was using too many terms like 'LRA' and 'PNR.' We also wrote: 'We know you check against the Amex fares; so do we.' " (American Express is AstraZeneca's designated travel management company.)

Continental Tyres operates a corporate-travel purchasing community on its social software platform, IBM Connections (formerly IBM Lotus Connections). The community shares feedback on supplier performance and Bruss also posts training blogs, since most participants are part-time, nonspecialized travel managers. Continental recently implemented the Lanyon hotel RFP process in five countries and Bruss quickly was able to educate the travel team in other countries about it.

He said the community is particularly useful as a self-help forum. "One person asked a question about policy and received answers from 13 countries in two days," he said. Members also upload white papers and industry forecasts.