I've have refrained from posting in this thread, mainly due to collecting my thoughts and thinking through some points. This was helped in part during a near 3hr skype call with a fellow AFF member during which we covered life, the universe, its meaning, and figured out that 42 is not the answer to everything despite the instance of one Douglas Adams in his guidebook to the galaxy for an audience of hitch-hikers.
Ahem, I digress.
Was it a failure? No. Could they have avoided what happened? As explained below, Yes - through selection of a better hash tag.
My view is that this isn't the disaster that main stream media (MSM for short) have portrayed it as. I further posit that this has been used to describe it by writers who are devoid of knowledge about the medium in question, and editors who are more focused on attention grabbing headlines than actual facts.
The whole explosion of what became the #qantasluxury meme came about because some A-grade comedians followed the Qantas twitter account, and identified the comedic value of parodying the hashtag. As they say, the recipe for comedy is tragedy plus time.
As a consequence of their parodying the tag, this was picked up by their legions of followers whom also decided to enjoy the fun these comedians had found - hence causing it to become a top trend on twitter that day.
If anything, we Aussies don't mind kicking someone when they are down on account of Tall Poppy Syndrome - and the explosion of laughs around the tag was a manifestation of this.
As some have alluded to, it could be said that any publicity is good publicity. While that axiom may hold true in some respects, most users of the internet are reasonably intelligent human beings. Those who participated in the growing meme would have known full well about the Qantas grounding, and decided to have some additional fun at the airlines expense. Those who knew nothing would be more than likely to find out what it was about before forming their own opinions. Therefore the brand damage from this meme is negligible at best.
A further argument could be made to look at how many of those participating in the joke actually fly the carrier. I'll leave that for demographers and researchers to figure out, but I'd suggest the number of those who do fly QF in this cohort would be an insignificant number.
Further, those who participated in the joke weren't the target audience of the giveaway in the first place. This was QF's social media team simply sharing something small but inexplicably valuable to those who'd consider themselves fans of the brand. Reading any further into this, as was done by some reporters, is a folly and wasted.
It's also important to note that twitter-based competitions aren't new for the airline, this is the third or fourth of these run this year. Some of you might remember the photos and ideas for the weirdest places to wear a pair of QF PJ's, where the prize was in fact one of ten pairs of said PJ's.
One also must turn to why this happened, and what could have been done differently to avoid a mountain being made out of a molehill. The simple answer to this is selection of something more innocuous - Luxury given the timing and proximity to recent events was not the most prudent word to use. They would have been far better selecting something less recognisable, such as the name of the case designer, #qantaskit, or an acronym understood only by the target audience (ie. frequent flyers and aviation geeks like ourselves).
Is it a problem or should someone be fired? Hell no. This was a team of people within the airline trying to return to business as usual. They simply kept up something that would provoke thought about the carrier amongst their fans which they had done several times previously. It's just one poor choice of word, and firing someone for it would be akin to crying over spilt milk.
Little did they know they were all getting said PJ's for Christmas!!
