SOCIAL MEDIA
Community service
New tools and apps mean that social media’s role in business travel continues to develop
ByLINDA FOX I
T’S TRUE TO SAY SOCIAL MEDIA hasn’t really caught on in the management of business travel – yet. Pioneers in trying to build communities for business travellers included Dopplr
and, in many ways, itinerary manage- ment services TripIt and WorldMate. Then things went quiet until a couple of
years ago when corporates started looking at collaboration tools such as Yammer and the potential of applications for a company’s travelling employee. Again, not massive traction in terms of business travel management but those who are using social media are finding it really helpful in many ways. The travel team at Microsoft, for example,
has been using Yammer for the past few years. What started as a small-scale plan around general collaboration and getting travellers to share feedback has become a company-wide strategy around engaging with employees. MS Travel’s global lead for employee
engagement and user experience Julia Fidler says that as with any emerging channel,
50 BBT May/June 2017
Yammer attracts specific types of travellers, as well as according to region and culture. Travellers in China and Latin America
are less likely to engage with it, being gener- ally more used to a higher-touch service. That said, some 30,000 – half of Micro-
soft’s travelling employees, use the travel category of the service and there are even those that could be described as advocates in the mix. Fidler says: “We’ve been able to get some great support from a small number of regular travellers who are first to answer. You would think they were working for us.” As well as collaboration around a po-
tential meeting or trip, Yammer is good for educating travellers on travel policy and programme, and supporting them before, during and after booking. There are some challenges around using
the service, such as the right tone and language to use when interacting with trav- ellers, and consistency of responses from the team. There’s also the need to ensure people make allowances for each other because of the open nature of the forum. So far, Fidler hasn’t encountered any secu- rity issues around using Yammer, with the
only concern being sharing of hotel codes specific to Microsoft. As you might expect, working within a technology company, Fidler believes the use of these social and collaboration-type tools in travel management will grow. “Three years ago, if you asked if there would be a strong social media presence in a business, there would have been shaking of heads. As our working population has started to change, we can see the uptake of things that three to five years ago were not feasible.”
CHANGING WORKFORCE The presence of the younger workforce and the bottom-up push in terms of the sort of technology they want to use is not the only driver for the use of social-style services in corporate travel. These types of services can play a role in
that shift to supporting the traveller’s needs and trying to engage them. There’s also a need to embrace, or at
least be aware of, new channels to market. It’s worth remembering how quickly new technologies catch on today – it only took Facebook three-and-a-half years to get to
BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM
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