Ryan Air and George Orwell
This week’s been great for blogging stories – first Ryan Air gave us a first-class example of how not to engage in the blogosphere, then the medium gets great public recognition courtesy of the George Orwell prize.
When lone blogger Jason Roe posted that he’d got the Ryan Air website to display a flight price of 0.00, he probably didn’t realise he’d end up featured on the Times Online within a week.
But, thanks to a vitriolic and profane response by (a now confirmed) Ryan Air employee, bloggers everywhere have been linking to Jason’s blog.
The result? The number and influence of sites talking about this means that now a Google search for ‘Ryan Air’ brings up the Times Online at number five.
Whether Ryan Air care about this is doubtful, given their official response denouncing ‘idiot’ and ‘lunatic’ bloggers – but it is a great example of the potential effect on brand image when you go about engaging in the conversation in the wrong way.
A polite, or even grateful response might not have got the same coverage (given everyone’s love of a juicy story), but at least it wouldn’t have further cemented the company’s ‘bullish’ (and that’s being polite) image.
On a more positive note, Radio 4’s today programme announced that this year’s George Orwell prize for political writing is featuring a category for political blogs.
It’s a great public endorsement of the medium and recognition of the people behind it as credible writers (rather than idiots or lunatics!).
About time too – as Evan Davis asked this morning – if Orwell was still around today, might he be a blogger?
Max St John wrote this on 26.02.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Blogging, Interesting, NixonMcInnes, Social media box
On February 26th, 2009 at 11:54 am, Glenn responded:
I do wonder if the member of staff was the same person who issued the press release. Used the same sort of language.
What can Ryanair hope to gain from this? At the very best it has no affect but even if one person stops using Ryanair because of this they have lost out.
Is this a business that doesn’t understand the online audience or do they really just not care?