I find online travel agency Travelocity to be a great example of how a company should handle its online communication efforts and include social media in the mix. I had used Travelocity to book a BA flight through Heathrow (which is supposed to be next week) - here's how the story goes:

• About two weeks ago, Travelocity sent me an email informing me of the strike BA is going through at the moment and that it may affect my flight. The email linked to a very specific page on ba.com where I could check whether my flight would be cancelled or not. BA also sent me an email, but only days later. I tweeted about it - they picked it up and tweeted back, and also started following me.
• A few days later, they emailed me again saying that the strike would be called off. BA didn't even bother emailing me again. I tweeted again, they replied again.
• After the BA union won its appeal and the strike was back on, Travelocity emailed me once again concerning the new developments (within hours after the story broke).
  
• Then they went on to include me in their Follow Friday list (their Twitter account has over 38,000 followers).
• They asked me via email to complete a survey about how I thought they handled this situation - I instantly responded, quite positively as you may be able to tell.

All in all, this just proves that it doesn't really take a lot of effort to keep customers in touch with your brand, yet there are very few companies who actually do this successfully. Kudos to Travelocity for being one of them.

Right now, European airlines have to deal with an unprecedented global flight disruption, and its cause is completely out of their hands. Millions of passengers are stranded or seeing their plans go up in smoke. So how are these airlines communicating with their customers - by telling everyone to just call their offices?

Needless to say, their annoying automated-answering-machine-powered call centers are an option for frustrated travellers. But most of them also have social pages, so why not make proper use of them?

While I'm trying to put together a nice case study about this, so far I have only noticed Lufthansa to actively engage their customers via their Facebook fan page (with a few updates a day + responding to their fans' wall posts) and their US Twitter account (tweeting latest news and @replying to people).