AIR NEW ZEALAND TWITTER AND THE NANA TEST

As yo know we are pretty conversant with most popular forms of social media. We have about 650 followers on Twitter.

Most are wine, journos, foodies and social media types. We can get an estimate of our reach pretty quickly using a variety of tools. Tweetreach is a good quick and dirty measure of reach - which is really just a measure of who received your tweet, not who read it or who passed it on. Although we only use the free version - the paid version had substantially more clip on services.

Anyway, since about May 11 we have been in "dialogue with Air New Zealand over a refund issue. The actual details are boring other than to say it related to a full flexi flight for 2 people that was cancelled and the check in chick recommended that a refund be sought. So we did.

It took about 20 mins on the phone to the first Airnz customer services bloke CS1 to detail what and where etc. He said that he had all the details and would pass them onto the refund team.

And he advised us to check up on them to see how things were going in a week or so.

Good oh, we said.

So a week went by and we did check. Strangely we had to repeat the process all over again re explaining the details to customers service chick CS 2. It took another 30 minutes. Then she told us she was relaying all the details to the refund team and then she would let me talk to them.

By this stage we had started to twitter our less than satisfactory experience.

Then we spoke to refund customers services chick 3 who asked us to detail everything in an email. I said that by this stage there must be a file as CS 1 and CS 2 both detailed everything so there was no need to waste even more of my time by getting me to detail it all in an email again.

She put me on hold for about 1o mins and then she came back and said yes there was a file and it would be acted on today.

I was still merrily twittering away and by this stage 3400 people had received my tweets on the subject.

I got a tweet from @flyairnz asking if there was anything they could do.

15 minutes later I got an email from the refund team saying that the refund had been put on my visa.

Now all the customer services people were lovely to deal with. Although I did feel CS3 was trying to stall the process. But the system for refunds is not customer friendly.

We love Airnz and its snazzy marketing and excellent use of social media, its wonderful flight stuff and the way its part of the kiwi psyche. We love the way they embrace technology and really try to do the best for the customer most of the time.

And as well all know its the putting right that counts. And they did.

But this does not pass our Nana test. That is - would a little old lady get a refund or would she give up because it was all to hard and the obfuscation and lack of clear process would have been too much?

Our money is on Nana giving up.

So no it doesn't pass the Nana test.

And we want to know why it would take - 4 - 6 weeks to process a refund as we were advised by CS2 today. Considering that you can only fly if you pay up front - 4-6 weeks for a refund is just insulting and usurious.

If it was good enough to sort out my refund in 2 weeks its good enough to sort it out in the same time frame for everyone else.

And it still leaves me pretty impressed that Twitter is a good way to get the attention of a social media savvy company like Air New Zealand.

ICING ON A HOT NZ CAKE.

We reckon that this is the time we really need to sell our place- New Zealand. While Tourism New Zealand does a pretty good job - its time for the rest of New Zealand to start selling our story.

Early this morning we saw a tweet from the Wine Diva, a well known Canuck wine writer and tweeter.

Daenna van Mulligen has been tweeting for the last few weeks as she travelled around NZ chronicling her experiences . If we were writing about Wine full time - she would set the benchmark for use of social media and telling the story of wine in a fun way.

And she is a shining example of how we can get the "story" of New Zealand out through the "new media," online media, social media - what ever you want to call it.

Today we retweeted her wonderful take on NZ. She was glowing in her praise for New Zealand wine and Air New Zealand but she found pineapple lumps hard to swallow...

We have about 630 solid followers on Twitter and have got to the stage where twits with large audiences are following us. We loved what Thewinediva wrote about New Zealand. So we retweeted it. Then we checked on an online tool called Tweetreach later in the morning to see just how many people saw the story. Its a quick and dirty measure of how far your tweet goes. That single tweet went close to reaching 30,000 people in the space of a couple of hours.

We know that it only measures reach and not action and yes we have less than a thousand followers but handled right a tweet like that can suddenly be "heard" by a huge international audience. We know from the #hashtag #nzwine on twitter that it has been retweeted by thousands more people. So the reach of a positive article, if you have the right followers, is exponential.

For anyone who is a bit cynical about twitters ability to spread the word this is an example of how it works. Its like icing on a hot cake.

Thanks theWineDiva- you have showed us a small part of the future.

So New Zealand - get on board - lets sell ourselves to the world- it only takes 140 letters.