Lufthansa’s MySkyStatus: Planes Are Tweeting?!

Written by Igor Beuker on October 14th, 2009 | 3 comments

Is Twitter a hype or a trend, marketers mostly ask me at conferences. It switched from the hype to the trend stage already a while ago, is my answer. Off course I need to show compelling examples to proof my statement. How about this ingenious idea by Lufthansa: it’s planes are posting Tweets…

Off course it’s not the plane itself doing the Tweeing: it’s the airline. Lufthansa has set up a new and very cool service named MySkyStatus. It automatically posts the current position of flights to Twitter or Facebook, so your friends, co-workers or family can follow your travels.

The smart part of this functionality: when your friend i.e. is on an United Airlines flight and you see his Tweet, you can click that link, and it immediately directs you to the Lufthansa MySkyStatus page, with a Google Map of the flight’s position.

Meaning, what advertising does not bring, smart social content and functionalities can do! Since with this smart Twitter functionality, Lufthansa is getting free social media promotion from people travelling on all airlines. How about that?

On a long haul flights, the functionality may post 10 updates or more, but the functionality is so cool that I’m prepared to give some slack to those Twitter (Twitter) and Facebook (Facebook) friends who have decided to put their updates on autopilot.

It seems that the system posts the flight’s position around once per hour, pulling info from a database of flight information. See how it looks below.

So a short recap of Lufthansa MySkyStatus, while you’re in the air, it sends: altitude, location, departure and arrival updates automatically to your Facebook and Twitter pages.

What I like about the service is that you can stay socially connected, even when your devices need to be shut off during flights. It certainly facilitates and fuels the always connected lifestyle of screenagers.

Do you feel this Lufthansa functionality has made travel more social and relevant? Share us your thoughts now…

Source: Mashable

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3 Comments

• Dansublog (Dansu Dansu) says:

  October 14, 2009 at 17:34

  Lufthansa’s tweetin’ planes http://tinyurl.com/yhtw7yh

  Reply
• Ricardo says:

  October 15, 2009 at 11:48

  Very nice! Now this is the kind of innovation in marketing and in the making of services better is worthwhile.

  Reply
• Igor Beuker says:

  October 15, 2009 at 13:02

  Hey Ricardo

  Thanks for your response. Fully agree: marketing is more than shouting ads, so it should include smart content and relevant functionalities as well.

  Cheers

  Igor

  Reply