Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Update 3:55 p.m. ET – Darkness and bad weather has hampered the search for the missing plane but more than 100 people on the ground are continuing to search the mountains where the airplane disappeared. Two helicopters had to end their search, but are expected to try again at daybreak.

A Sukhoi Superjet 100 is missing in Indonesia after departing Jakarta with 50 people on board. The Russian jet was carrying Indonesian airline representatives as well as other airline industry passengers on a demo flight during a tour of Asia organized by the Russian plane maker.

The Sukhoi jet is Russia’s most modern airliner and first flew in 2008. The narrow-body airliner is aimed at the regional airline sector and is designed to compete with the more popular airplanes from Bombardier and Embraer. The Russian company partnered with Italy’s Alenia Aeronautica on the Superjet 100 project and the engines are a French/Russian partnership.

Sukhoi hopes to sell the 68- to 103-seat jet throughout parts of Asia, Western Europe and North America, where Russian aircraft have yet to find any customers. The Superjet 100 is a modern design with fly-by-wire control systems. Sukhoi is hoping the airplane will help shake the troubled reputation Russian-made aircraft have for questionable quality and accident rates much higher than their Western competitors. Last year Sukohi announced plans for a longer-range, business jet version of the airplane.

The Indonesian demo flight was scheduled to last less than an hour, but air traffic controllers lost contact with the jet while it was descending in a mountainous area, according to the BBC.

Sukhoi has delivered eight of the regional airliners and says it has orders for 240 more, mostly to customers outside of Russia. Indonesia-based airlines had already ordered more than 30 of the airplanes.

Delta Airlines announced on Monday that it’s offering free in-flight Wi-Fi for passengers — so long as they’re using it to access e-commerce giant Amazon.

Travelers onboard all Delta and Delta Connection flights with Wi-Fi connectivity will be able to visit and shop at Amazon.com and Amazonwireless.com free of charge. The move is a part of Delta’s efforts to invest more than $2 billion in enhanced global products, services and airport facilities through 2013.

To access the site, travelers can open their Internet browser on laptops and mobile devices to connect to the airline’s Wi-Fi portal, Delta Connect. The platform — powered by on-board wireless provider Gogo — also provides free access to real-time travel information, news content from The Wall Street Journal and People magazine, shopping deals and entertainment options. Passengers still have to pay to have full range of the Internet on flights.

“Delta continues to offer new technology and innovation that delivers on our customer preferences while they travel with us,” said Bob Kupbens, Delta’s vice president of marketing and digital commerce, in a statement. “Our customers enjoy our free content options in-flight and free access to Amazon provides a convenient way to shop online at 30,000 feet for things they want on the ground.”

Delta says it operates the world’s largest Wi-Fi-equipped fleet of aircraft, including its entire fleet of 550 domestic mainline aircraft. In total, more than 800 Delta aircraft are equipped with in-flight Wi-Fi service.

Do you think more airlines will partner with retailers to offer access to their sites while flying? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, youngvet

Airlines flying in Europe are finding different ways for handling the new emission trading scheme that took effect at the beginning of the year. While many airlines in North American and Asia continue to question the validity of the requirements to purchase carbon credits, several European carriers are developing plans for buying and trading carbon credits.

Germany’s Lufthansa told Reuters it has been continuously buying up credits on the open market. Currently carbon credits in Europe are at bargain prices. The price is about half of what it was in 2010 at roughly 7 Euros per ton of carbon. The requirement to buy carbon credits is effectively a tax to provide an economic incentive to minimize emissions of C02 by the airlines.

As of January 1, airlines flying to and from EU airports must have enough carbon credits to cover the emissions from their flights. The airlines join power and industrial plants in the EU that have been submitting carbon credits since 2005. Under the plan the airlines are given a number of free carbon credits to cover some of their operations, they must acquire the remaining credits either through trade or purchase.

Members of the Star Alliance group which includes United and Lufthansa told Reuters they will likely use a broker to help members buy credits on the open market at discounted rates. Airlines in the rival SkyTeam including Air France and Delta are expected to trade internally with members of the airline group to acquire some of the needed credits, purchasing the rest on the market.

Some United States carriers have already said they will be adding a surcharge to cover the cost of the credits.

A representative of Air France told Reuters the fleet will receive a free allocation of about 12.6 million tons of credit, but it expects to emit between 16-17 million tons for 2012.

Both Air France and Lufthansa say they are buying credits directly from a Paris based exchange known as BlueNext.

In the coming  years airlines are expected to begin hedging and trading carbon credits in much the same way they do with jet fuel today. Buying and trading of carbon credits is expected to pick up dramatically this year as the airlines will be required to submit their credits against the free allocations.

Photo: Lufthansa

 

Russian airplane maker Sukhoi is joining the business jet community with a VIP version of its SuperJet 100 regional airliner. The new Sukhoi business jet joins Boeing and Airbus, along with the Brazilian company Embraer and Canada’s Bombardier in converting airliners for private use.

The Sukhoi 100 that the SBJ is based on first flew in 2008. The regional jet has seating for up to 103 passengers. More than 300 have been sold, mostly to Russian airlines, though operators in Thailand, Indonesia, Italy and Mexico also have Sukhois on order.

The launch customer for the SBJ is the Swiss company Comlux. The new Russian business jet will be added to Comlux’s fleet of 19 charter aircraft that includes several Airbus Corporate Jets, business jets from Bombardier and a Boeing 767. Comlux placed an order for four of the $50 million jets and expects to take delivery of the first one in 2014.

The airframe of the Sukhoi is made in Russia where the airplane is assembled, though the engines and most of the systems are from the west. Russia has a long history of civil airplane manufacturing, though very few have been able to penetrate markets beyond the former iron curtain. Sukhoi is most famous for its history building fighter jets, including the SU-27.

Sukhoi is one of several companies currently entering the airline market through regional jets. Both Embraer and Bombardier successfully joined the global marketplace years ago filling in the smaller end of the jet market not covered by Boeing and Airbus. Companies in both China and India are also planning regional jets of their own.

The fly-by-wire Sukhoi business jet will have a 4,300 mile range, though with a limited passenger load. With a cruise speed of around 530 miles per hour, the SBJ offers performance similar to other jets of its size.

Image: SuperJet International

Nate Elliott is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, where he helps interactive marketers around the world develop the strategies and tactics that make them successful, and then helps them measure the results. You can follow him on Twitter at @nate_elliott.

Last year, American consumers posted more than a billion opinions about products and services online, according to data collected by my company. With peer influence playing such a prominent role in consumers’ purchase decisions, it’s no surprise many interactive marketers are tapping into that influence via viral marketing programs and influencer outreach.

However, the vast majority of marketers ignore the staggering volume of social data all this influence creates. And those who do study social data typically use it for the wrong reason: to measure the brand impact of their marketing campaigns.

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Social Data Is Often Based On Small Sample Sizes

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With so many opinions posted online, you might assume it would be easy to find a reliable sample of data to analyze for brand impact. But even popular consumer brands often find it difficult to collect usable social data.

For instance, I recently reviewed a listening report for a global sporting goods brand — one that sponsors leading teams and athletes around the world and has strong brand awareness. I was surprised to see that the brand was mentioned in social media only a few hundred times each week in the U.S., and less than 100 times each week in other key markets around the world.

To make matters worse, the low quality of many social sentiment analysis tools reduces sample sizes further. When listening tools can’t decide whether comments are positive or negative, they’re usually labeled as having “no sentiment.” Three-quarters of the mentions for this brand were tagged as such, leaving less than two-dozen weekly usable posts in some markets.

If you asked your market insights team or your survey provider to analyze 25 consumer survey responses, they’d tell you it’s impossible to find statistical significance in such a small sample. The same standards must be applied to social data as well.

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Social Creators Aren’t Necessarily Representative of Your Audience

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Although most online users today engage with social media, that doesn’t mean the consumers who post social content offer a representative sample. In fact, 20-year-olds are twice as likely as 40-year-olds to be what my company calls “conversationalists” — people who post status updates on Facebook or Twitter. And they’re three times as likely to be what we call “creators” — people who post blogs or videos online.

If you’re marketing a product targeted primarily to younger consumers, you might find that the people posting in social media look something like your audience. But for many marketers, that’s simply not the case.

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Social Data Usually Measures Extremes

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Ever notice that most online reviews are either very positive or very negative? It’s not your imagination. Our data shows that most social influence posts are extreme in nature – and it happens for two reasons.

First, consumers are simply more motivated to post opinions online if those opinions are strong. If I don’t have a strong opinion, I probably won’t take the time. That’s why nearly three-quarters of customer ratings on Amazon’s ten best-selling books are either 1′s or 5′s, and why very few reviews fall in between those extremes.

Second, so many posts about products and services are driven by individual experiences that they’re bound to be polarized in nature. If I waited in line at the bank for 20 minutes, I may fill the time telling Twitter that I hate my bank. Conversely if I get a free upgrade on my flight, I might post about how much I love my airline. Perhaps these are useful customer service data points (and they definitely influence other consumers), but they’re not a reliable gauge of overall sentiment towards your brand or campaign.

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Valuable Ways for Marketers To Use Social Data

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So if you shouldn’t use social data to measure brand impact, what is it good for?

Lots of things. Whether you or your company works directly with social media or not, you should be using social data right now to:

• Develop your messaging. If you want to create messages that resonate with your audience, you need to know what it cares about. For instance, companies are using private listening communities to craft their marketing messages. And increasingly, companies are using data from public social media as an additional marketing guide.
• Source your creative. We know that consumers trust what they hear from other consumers more than any other source of information. So why not use listening platforms to identify positive social content that can be included in campaign creative? I’ve even seen UK bank First Direct use social sentiment data in an outdoor advertising campaign.
• Improve your media plan. You probably already have a few staples in your online media plan — the sites and networks that consistently perform for you. But social data can help you find new sites to add to your buy. For instance, when Microsoft found that people were talking about its computers in forums dedicated to fishing and cars, it quickly added those sites to its plan.
• Identify your key influencers. According to our studies, consumers in the U.S. create more than 500 billion peer-to-peer impressions about brands and products per year. Social data can help you identify (and then reach out to) the most vocal and influential of those consumers, either individually or by finding the forums in which your brand will have the most influence.
• React to your consumers. You can’t fuel a positive conversation about your products (or get involved in a negative one) unless you find those conversations first. Listening platforms can help you quickly find both the good and the bad so you’re in a position to react.

The key here is to successfully build social data into marketing programs – and not to use it, like most companies, as a tool to measure those programs.

Disclosure: Microsoft is a client of the author’s company.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Yakobchuk

American Airlines announced a record-setting order for new aircraft today, and it shows where the airline industry is headed.

The Dallas-based company will buy 460 planes from Airbus and Boeing, with options for another 465. The massive order comes as airlines rush to reduce operating costs by replacing their aging fleets with new, more fuel-efficient aircraft. The order brought with it an announcement from Boeing on the fate of the 737, which will be updated and not replaced.

With the current state of the economy and many airlines still counting pennies, the giant order has raised questions in some quarters. But airline analyst Richard Aboulafia says it’s all about the race toward efficiency.

“It’s fundamentally a defensive move,” he says. “Everybody is looking for a hedge against expensive fuel.”

In the world of single aisle, narrow body airliners, that hedge comes from new, fuel-efficient engines.

New engine designs and technology are driving the efficiency push we’re seeing from Boeing and Airbus. We’re also seeing improvements in the airframes, including weight reduction and aerodynamic improvements. Both companies claim efficiency improvements of around 15 percent for the newest narrow body models expected to fly within the next several years.

The technology is available to dramatically cut fuel costs with re-engined airplanes compared to the airplanes in many fleets that have been flying 20 years or more. This gives the industry the motivation to purchase new airplanes, says Aboulafia. The key is there is money available to buy the jets — about $13 billion in the case of the American deal.

“You’ve got access to jet finance coupled with high fuel prices,” ” Aboulafia says, “and that shifted the cost burden away from capital costs and towards operating costs.”

Airbus appears to be the winner in the American Airlines order with 260 airplanes. It begins with current A320 series airplanes in 2013 and 130 orders for the new A320neo (new engine option) beginning in 2017. The A320neo was the big hit of the Paris Air Show last month. American placed options to purchase another 365 airplanes from the European company.

On the Boeing side, the order includes 200 airplanes. Half will be from the existing lineup of 737s known as the 737NG (Next Generation). But the big news was Boeing’s announcement that it will not replace the 737 with a new model, but instead re-engine the current 737 and make improvements to the airframe. This is similar to what Airbus did with the A320neo. There’s no word on the new name for the improved 737. May we suggest Next Next Generation, or NGSquared?

Boeing CEO Jim Albaugh says the decision was driven largely by the need to have airplanes available sooner rather than later.

“Our customers wanted more efficiency now and certainty of delivery,” he said.

American placed options to buy an additional 100 airplanes from Boeing’s 737 family in the announcement today.

Image: Airbus

Most of the big news at the Paris Air Show usually is about what’s being unveiled at the industry’s big event that begins next week. But this year both Boeing and Honeywell are getting a leg up on the flurry of news by talking up how they are getting to Le Bourget Field.

Later today, Honeywell will fly its Gulfstream 450 on the first transatlantic flight using a biofuel blend. And on Monday, Boeing will fly to Paris with its new 747-8 freighter (above, during first flight) also on a biofuel blend. Both companies are flying to Paris with a biofuel produced using a process Honeywell developed. On each flight a blend of fuel derived from the camelina plant will be used without any modifications being made to the aircraft.

Earlier this month the use of biofuels in aviation took a significant step forward when ASTM International issued a provisional set of standards for the production aviation biofuel. This begins the regulatory process for the commercial use of biofuels in airliners and other aircraft.

There have been numerous demonstration flights in both commercial and military aircraft using biofuel. But the wide spread use of biofuels in aviation is still many years off says analyst Richard Aboulafia. But he says pressure from outside the industry, especially in Europe, makes it important to get the word out early.

“It’s important given the political pressure and regulatory climate to message there’s something coming” he says.

Honeywell’s Jim Rekoske acknowledges the widespread use of biofuels in aviation is indeed not going to happen next week. But he says with the provisional ASTM standard now available, commercial facilities can now be built, something that was difficult up until now.

“Finding somebody who would put up their money in order to build a facility to produce a fuel that is not approved for use is a bit of a challenge.”

The next big challenge for the industry if it ever hopes to use significant quantities of a blend of biofuels in jet aircraft is the cost of the biofuel. Jet fuel is a significant portion of the cost of doing business in the airline industry, as well as for air forces around the world. Every penny fluctuation in the cost of jet fuel has massive implications on the bottom line.

According to Rekoske Honeywell’s production process will be licensed to fuel producers. Currently he says the cost differential between converting petroleum oil into jet fuel versus converting a biomass derived oil is about four to five dollars a barrel – about 10 to 12 cents per gallon. That’s significant for an industry that counts the number of peanuts in a package.

Beyond the construction of the conversion facilities, the availability of a feedstock is the next challenge in reducing that price differential.

“Last year there were about 40-50,000 acres in the United States that were cultivated with camelina plants” Rekoske says. “That produced about 500-600,000 gallons of camelina oil.”

Camelina has been the dominant feedstock for jet fuel blended biofuel so far. But algae based fuels are also being looked at as a way to produce the quantities of oil needed to have a significant impact in the industry. World wide Rekoske says more than 50 billion gallons of jet fuel were burned last year.

Honeywell’s Gulfstream will be flying on a 50/50 blend of camelina derived fuel on its way to Paris. The Boeing 747-8 will be burning a blend using 15 percent of the same biofuel.

Photo: Jason Paur/Wired.com

Have you noticed how upbeat the ads for airlines and banks are?

Judging from the billboards and the newspaper ads, you might be led to believe that Delta is actually a better airline, one that cares. Or that your bank has flexible people eager to bend the rules to help you succeed.

At one level, this is good advertising, because it tells a story that resonates. We want Delta to be the airline it says it is, and so we give them a try.

The problem is this: ads like this actually decrease user satisfaction. If the ad leads to expect one thing and we don’t get it, we’re more disappointed than if we had gone in with no real expectations at all. Why this matters: if word of mouth is the real advertising, then what you’ve done is use old-school ad techniques to actually undercut any chance you have to generate new-school results.

So much better to invest that same money in delighting and embracing the customers you already have.

This week BP successfully recapped its ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. Test results are favorable and show that oil and gas are, for the time being, confined. This news inspires cautious optimism in the hearts of residents and spectators alike. Online, however, the social effect continues to flow across social networks and social graphs, echoing anger, hope, and the demand for resolution and prevention from BP and the Obama administration.

If we were to look back and examine the extent of these online conversations and the associated sentiment related to this catastrophic event, we realize just how pervasive social networking is becoming to society. Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr served as primary media hubs for sharing pictures, videos, and information. And, studying this activity could yield an ocean of insight.

If one social community represented a repository of collective consciousness for study today, there is no need to look beyond Twitter.

Twitter as a Human Seismograph

Twitter recently reported 105 million registered users with 190 million monthly page views. Whatever the actual user count is and how many of those users actually Tweet vs. solely consume content, it’s clear that the public stream and the oceans of conversations it feeds is the Web’s most important database of collective consciousness.

Our voices and our thoughts form much more than trends and trending topics, when assembled, they reveal raw human sentiment, perception and also indicate the responses and actions that materialize as a result. What was once purely a human seismograph for measuring events and reactions has now evolved into a vibrant society where the united intelligence that’s available to us both historically and in real-time is greater than the sum of its conversational parts. If Twitter were the United Nations, its representatives would span the globe and rank 11th in terms of overall population, just behind Mexico and just ahead of the Philippines. Needless to say, the communication and connections that power the Twitterverse are indeed representative of a universal culture.

Study: Evolving Sentiment Towards Obama and BP

Working with PeopleBrowsr, we focused our research on the U.S. Gulf oil crisis, one of the most important stories dominating the news, our hearts and minds, and now history books. While emotions, opinions, and hope run deep, this report will focus on the state of human sentiment as defined by public conversations on Twitter.

The goal of this report was to surface and spotlight views and feelings as they evolved over time. Concurrently, we set out to demonstrate perception vs. actuality by separating the developing attitudes that defined the state of Obama and BP over the course of several months.

To align our calendars, the BP oil spill was first reported on April 20th, 2010 as a result of Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion that killed 11 platform workers and injured 17 others.

This study examines sentiment dating back to March 2010 and continues into June 2010.

It’s important to consider in this analysis that we viewed all conversations related to the White House and Obama as a whole and not isolated by the oil spill specifically. We did so to demonstrate the Gulf’s impact on White House sentiment as it became clear that the explosion was much more than an unfortunate incident. Also, the following sentiment data is the result of human sorted tweets that were randomly sampled over time.

Sentiment: Obama

Using Twitter as a micro approval indicator, the BP oil spill does not appear to be “Obama’s Katrina.” Based on the data reviewed thus far, Obama’s public approval doesn’t seem to indicate the intense backlash shortly following Katrina.

Between March and June 2010 (98 days), Obama and the White House was the subject of over 2.5 million tweets. Of that, an estimated 213,000 were specifically related to the BP oil spill. And over the course over those three-plus months, sentiment averaged 64.55% neutral, 28.5% negative and 7% positive.

Sentiment: BP

Applying the same lens to BP, total conversations tied to BP and the oil spill between March and June 2010 (98 days) skyrocketed to an approximated 1.1 million tweets. Of those conversations, 59.06% were deemed negative with an additional 8.98% categorized as very negative. 28.20% of those tweets remained neutral and believe it or not, 3.14% were viewed as positive.

Sentiment: Comparing BP and Obama Over Three Months

Positive: Starting with positive sentiment, the nosedive for both is grave. Doubts for resolution and swift response caused the lack of public support for both Obama and BP and ultimately shifted towards sharp criticism and deafening cries for action and resolution.

Prior to the oil spill, BP was perched at its apex of positive sentiment. As the attempts to cap the gushing well failed, sentiment plunged 61.5% over three months. Obama also fell 63.3% from its high in March to a three month low.

Neutral: When either negative or positive conversations increase, it’s usually at the expense of indifferent banter. As expected, BP conversations hurtled by 53.39% between March and May. On the other hand, Tweets related to Obama and the White House actually increased over the course of 90 days by 24.9%.

Negative: When reviewing negative sentiment related to BP, there’s a reason the term hockey stick is used when referring to graphs. In March, BP was already the subject of negative commentary; however, after the explosion, critical conversations skyrocketed 107.05%, representing a devastating vertical spike in antipathetic public opinion.

On the contrary however, unfavorable Tweets related to Obama practically remained constant, declining a bit by 1.29%.

The average sentiment comparing BP and Obama eerily aligned, indicating that from a public perception standpoint, proactive leadership and resolution is critical.

March

April

May/June

Hashtags

Hashtags were originally introduced into the Twitter stream by Chris Messina as a way of categorizing conversations by topic and theme. Over time however, the role of hashtags expanded beyond classification to now also convey emotion or observation. For example, conversations related to the oil spill include hashtags as sentiment or for conveying implicit messages such as “I can’t believe the BP oil well is still gushing #IhateBP!” and “The BP oil spill represents why offshore drilling should be banned #helpsavethegulf.”

Tweets populated with references and messages conveyed through hashtags were overflowing and for the purpose of this report, we focused on spotlighting only those densely tied to the event as well as President Obama.

To demonstrate the extent of these particular hashtag references, we visualized them through an overlay graph dating back to the beginning of the year and running through the end of June.

The number of Tweets including the following hashtags between April 20th and June 30th demonstrate only a sample of all oil spill related conversations, but offer a glimpse of the role hashtags play in this unique forum.

Total Hashtag References: April 20 – June 30, 2010
#oilspill = 438,926
#gulf = 35,225
#obama = 92,430
#bp = 225,365

Gallup: President Obama Job Approval

Reviewing President Obama’s Job Approval at Gallup, we can visualize a steady decline in approval and rise in disapproval with 47% and 46% respectively.

For Obama advisors as well as those on his communications team, a month-by-month comparison of the erosion of BP and White House sentiment screams for decisive action.

#ThankYou

Thank you to everyone contributing donations and volunteering time to the Gulf Coast clean up effort.

By Brian Solis: www.briansolis.com

Image Credit: ShutterStock