Making information work

As you might know, I am heavily biased towards Boeing in the ongoing battle between aircraft manufacturers. My critique of Airbus, however, will end today.

Airbus has always been way ahead of Boeing in terms of online communications. Where Boeing has felt stiff and old fashioned, Airbus has felt fresh and young. Airbus does not use even close to all the opportunities in front of them in the world of online marketing and communications, but they use way more than Boeing.

Today proves this point. A tragic accident involving an A320 occured outside France, and Airbus reacted online immediately. Firstly, they have let the www.airbus.com start page become a divider between the crisis information and the regular home page. This is important. The crisis section is informative, time stamped, version indicated and there is background information of the equipment.

They have also had search visibility in mind: the entire crisis section has “meta robots” data indicating “noindex, nofollow” to ensure that these pages will never be placed in a search engine. (I was suprised that they did not enforce this with the robots.txt file).

In my opinion, this is good crisis management. Not excellent, but significantly better than what Boeing has ever performed.

David