It’s no secret that the travel industry has shifted in the last few months with the onset of COVID-19. Travel plans have been uprooted, yet the value of community and the power of sentiment are stronger than ever. How does this translate to airport communications, activations, and strategies? Here’s how ModSquad worked with one of our amazing clients, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (also known as DFW) to make the most of a wonderful opportunity.

The Landscape Shifted 

Truthfully, the opportunities to engage with people via social media are endless. Simply sharing a post and hoping it resonates is not enough. DFW understands the importance of careful listening, connecting to a variety of communities, nourishing conversations with a broad audience, and analyzing data to gain insights and improve.

Leveraging social listening and reactive insights for proactive communication efforts is always important; it’s even more so when restrategizing your content calendar to address the current landscape. Even beyond engagement and community development, social moderation is a critical aspect of DFW’s marketing and customer service initiatives. Our two teams are innately connected, which is something we at ModSquad intrinsically believe in. It’s what helps our teams be successful. 

Our Strategy Shifted to Address the Current Situation

When there’s a shift in day-to-day business, the need for high-quality, engaging content becomes more important than ever. For DFW, we needed to find a way to vary our messaging so that we could provide followers with more than critical airport-operation updates. While situations like pandemics can create a sense of crisis, we felt it imperative to continue to speak with our customers with social content that resonates with them on a more sentimental level.

So when the U.S. Navy’s flight demonstration squadron, the Blue Angels, announced that they would be flying over the Dallas/Fort Worth region, we knew that this was a great opportunity to present meaningful real-time content that would truly resonate with DFW’s followers. It’s what the Texas community needed, and it’s what the airport’s aviation community (#avgeek) longed for.

Blue Angels Flyby Presented a Unique Opportunity 

Recognizing the value of this event, DFW management gave speedy approval for essential airport employees (police officers, firefighters, and EMS personnel) to come together in an epic parade on the runway to witness the Blue Angels flyover for #AmericaStrong as a community. The power of community is what tied this all together. We utilized the airport’s social channels to celebrate this event. Across DFW’s channels we informed and engaged followers, helping to connect the airport’s vast audience in a shared joyful experience. With this goal in mind, we shared event details, utilized our personal touch with live stories and interesting posts, and relayed our first-hand experience watching the flyover from the runway. The runway gathering even received local media attention.

Being Nimble Helped Us Make The Most of this Last Minute Event 

The flyover was a rousing success, both in the real world and online. The event delivered some of the airport’s most meaningful content to the loyal people who regularly follow and engage with DFW. Given the quick turnaround, we needed to work with assets in real time vs. pre-planned content. Being fast and nimble was a key to success here. Great content is made up of a story that’s meaningful to the audience and presented either as it’s happening or shortly thereafter. That can be missed when solely looking to planned content for effectiveness or prioritizing engagement over quality.

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Behind the Scenes Content Helps Humanize DFW

One of the beauties of social media is the ability to share events with a large audience quickly and easily (without relying solely on pre-planned content). Sharing a trending event as it happens allows brands to connect on a deeper level with their audience.

An event like this illustrates the value of unfiltered, transparent storytelling. People appreciate and want to experience this kind of honest, inclusive sharing — and frankly, so do we. Offering that kind of content positions your brand well versus the competition. Humanize your brand by presenting organic, unplanned content like a behind-the-scenes look or by responding and reacting to comments naturally. Being human on social media goes beyond merely responding to customers, though; it means sharing a perspective on topics, offering insight, and having an uplifting tone while still staying on brand.

Being nimble and harnessing community is ultimately the moral of this story. Without an understanding of your community and what’s important to them, you’ll be hard-pressed to deliver content they want to engage with. Every interaction needs to be intentional; that’s how DFW truly captures the love of their community.

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