WTH. Cebu Pacific is the second most tweeted airline?

Since last week, Cebu Pacific has been bragging about being the world’s 2nd most tweeted airline. Is this something that they should actually be happy about?

To find out, I looked up eezeer, the company that released this data, and looked at their Twitter reports for airlines within the last 6 months. Here’s what I found:

This spreadsheet that I made only includes Airline Listening, one of the categories they include in their report. Eezer defines Airline Listening as “public tweets received by airlines” – also called ‘Twitter mentions.’ They also have other categories like Airline Talking Champions (a list based on public tweets sent by airlines), global satisfaction, customers’ reason for tweeting, etc. I only included Airline Listening mainly because that’s what’s been making the news and what Cebu Pacific has been raving about.

The red highlights on the spreadsheet are airlines that made it to the top 10 ”Most-Complained-About Airlines” published by Travel + Leisure just this August. The green highlight was only used once –for Southwest Airlines.  And that’s because they get so few complaints that they can actually claim that they’re America’s least-complained-about airline. Note though that this list is from the US Department of Tourism.

And that’s where my problem begins.

Air Asia and Cebu Pacific are obviously Asian airlines but unfortunately there is no Asian nor Philippine tourism data available to tell me what the most-complained-about airline is in the Philippines or in Asia. Are these two airlines on this list because they’re one of the worst airlines? Or because people have been raving about them? Is there even a best/worst list? I suppose that would be strange to do since the Philippines only has four major airlines. I checked out our DOT website anyway just to see if they have published anything close to this and look what I found:

Nice. I had to use IE to check this out and they have nothing on airlines. Just hotels, travelers and destinations. Guess I’m left to do my own research!

My first stop was to check Twitter Sentiment. This is a good way to verify if being the 2^nd most tweeted is really something to be proud of since it could also mean you are simply the most tweeted because people want to complain and ask you for help and not exactly to praise or say hello. Note that Twitter Sentiment only gave me tweets from 3 days ago.

Okaaay. Not bad! Now let me look at the actual tweets since the problem with sentiment checking is that there’s no human involvement in it e.g. a tweet could say ‘I f*cking love Cebu Pacific’ but it will still count it as negative because it has the f word.

Just one negative tweet that was recorded as neutral and a couple of positively-rated tweets meant to be neutral. The rest are pretty accurate.

I’m not satisfied yet so I check out Social Mention to see what they have. Social Mention shows me tweets beginning the 1^st of September.

Is this really reliable? Hmm. Look at the top keywords for Cebu Pacific and that should give us an idea of what people have been mostly tweeting to them about: promos! This prompted me to check what PAL has.

@flyPAL’s strength is higher, passion is also higher but if you check out the keywords, they’re less positive. This makes more sense to me now adding all this with the recent articles I’ve read on these two airlines. I will attribute this to the fact that after all, PAL is laying people off and essentially struggling, while Cebu Pacific is being talked about as the 2^nd most tweeted airline on top of their already popular seat-sale promos. (If you look at Cebu Pacific’s quarterly report, you’ll see they actually have 12.1% increase in revenues for the six months ending June 30^th.)

Without any other source of data, I go back to eezer and check out their comparison widget. They’re the ones who released this data anyway so we’ll see what they show me.

I compared PAL vs. Cebu Pacific’s brand karma and interestingly, Cebu Pacific only surpassed PAL twice within the last 3 months. Cebu Pacific actually went as low as -16/-17 in brand karma points with PAL only going as low as -6/-7. Very interesting.

My last idea was to look at these 2 airlines’ Twitter accounts. You’ll see a big difference in the way they talk to their customers.

@cebupacificair obviously takes the jolly/happy/cheerful character which could be why they have 60,000 more followers than @flypal. The former also has double the number of tweets at 6,457 vs. PAL’s 3,663.

Tweets just mirror people’s experience with your brand and with Cebu Pacific making traveling way easier and more affordable for most Filipinos, this might just be why more people are tweeting about them – because more people are flying Cebu Pacific. As for that big drop in their brand karma, I say more people tweeting just means more chances of getting negative tweets.

Cebu Pacific is doing a good job managing their Twitter account and while they may receive hate tweets, they seem to respond to them quickly and calmly. So yes, I think them being the 2nd most tweeted airline is an achievement.

Now as for their service… Not sure what to say about the ‘on-time departures’ as I experienced very very few of them this year. Am I just unlucky or is this really happening to most travelers?

How about you? How was your experience with Cebu Pacific? Do you think they’re doing a good job on Twitter?

The New Facebook Timeline

Yes yes, I’m one of the many people who pretended to be a Facebook developer just to see how this new timeline feature looks like. After reading about it on almost every single tech blog after the f8 conference, and seeing the video for it, I decided that testing out the new Facebook Timeline should be on my to-do list. Surprisingly, it was really easy to do!

If you haven’t tried it out yet, head on over to Mashable’s how-to blog post. It’s pretty straightforward and the process is not complicated at all.

Now that Facebook has their own ‘timeline’, I wonder how this will affect Twitter’s version of it?

See, the word ‘timeline’ used to be just for Twitter even though some people claim it’s a ‘Twitter thread’ (I don’t know why when it doesn’t look anything like a forum) while some call it ‘Twitter stream’ (which makes more sense). But still, most people who really use Twitter should know that it’s called a timeline.

Facebook on the other hand, takes ‘timeline’ to the next level mainly because theirs is the real thing. It’s literally a timeline. Your posts, photos and wall posts are organized by month, year and even from when you were born! With Twitter? It’s just a tweet stream that disappears eventually depending if you’ve been archiving them.

While it may look complicated during the first 2 seconds you see it, it’s really not. In fact, the design is clean and… I hate to say this, but it actually looks nice. Timeline makes more sense than how the old Facebook profile page looks like… IF you like looking back at your old posts or photos.

The design also encourages users to add old photos or even places you’ve been to. Check this out, you can even add your life events – with surgery and breaking a bone already added in there!

Some may want to make full use of this and have their ‘lifebook’ open for all their friends to see but I know a bunch who just want to put the past behind and forget that they even wore elephant jeans when they were in high school or that they actually dyed their hair blue in college. It’s a good memory bank but not everyone wants other people to see that!

My aunties, uncles and parents will probably like this because this gives them a chance to show the world that they actually used to be skinny or that at one point, they also used to have hair. (Now if only they can figure out how to use it.)

The Facebook timeline is cool but I don’t think I’ll be adding old pictures to complete my very own lifebook. I’m happy using Facebook to share links, some pictures and to talk to my friends and family. I don’t think I’m the real target demographic for this release.

You have to think, “Why are they suddenly asking me to add details of my entire life on Facebook?”

Is it because they just want you to tell your life story so you can express who you are to your friends? Or is it because they want you to live on Facebook so that they will have more chances of serving Facebook ads to you and make more money from it?

Remember, Facebook is expected to IPO late next year so these changes are intended not just to increase users’ time on Facebook but to add more ways to serve even more targeted ads.

If you’re interested in how this works, check out what they released just a month ago: Facebook Ad Targeting by Topic.