A quick social media report from the Freddies

Last night’s Freddies Awards ceremony was, as always, a lot of fun as an event. I’m not quite as focused on who won which awards as some of the other folks here on Boarding Area (read their reports here, here and here) but I was at the event and I did see a few interesting trends, at least with respect to how social media played in to the awards program.

Delta Airlines won an award at 9:42pm. Mere moments later they had a tweet out about the win:

Of all the programs which had a win, this was the only company at the event tweeting it live. Kudos to them for being involved at that level.

Next up was an entertaining response to a tweet I posted. I was (and remain) somewhat surprised that Hyatt didn’t see better popularity in the voting. I can certainly come up with theories as to why but that isn’t really my point. Within mere moment of sending a tweet mentioning Hyatt (no hash tag or @ mention) their main account was following me. Good, I suppose, in that they are staying on top of mentions of their brand, even at 9pm. Bad, I think, in that the value of that engagement isn’t particularly great.

Finally, I was quite impressed to see that Baltic Air won two awards in the night. I give them a lot of credit for getting out the vote, as a very small carrier based in a very small country, And I think that the bulk of the credit for those wins goes to their social media strategy. They have a strong recent history of being very involved in the social media sphere (read more here and here). This was clearly a case of the social media efforts working to bring in real rewards to the company through their vote drive efforts.