Internet Marketing for Cathay Pacific Airline in China

I was doing an internship for Cathay Pacific and Dragonair Airline in Beijing from March to May 2010. My job responsibility was helping them to manage their Chinese "Twitter" account and increase the number of fans as many as possible.

As Facebook and Twitter are blocked, China developed its own versions of those social websites, like Kaixin001.com (almost a Ctrl +V of Facebook) and t.sina.com.cn (Twitter).












When I first heard I was going to do the “Internet Marketing Program”, I thought it must be something big and strategic. Then it turned out that I had a full time job of updating blogs.

However, I soon found that it was not as easy as just publishing news. There are all kinds of information on the main page and they are being replaced in a very fast pace. Updating blogs could not necessarily increase the number of fans or reviews from people. My main challenges included:

1) What tone shall I use? A person or a company?
2) What kind of information I should or I am allowed to post?
3) What is the best way to attract people?

I did speak like a machine at the beginning, like “April promotion, Beijing to Hong Kong RMB 1100”. Then people started to complain that they didn’t want to respond to a machine although the price was indeed good. It made me realized the platform was not for selling or direct advertising, but sharing ideas and communicating.

I listed all the possible topics that could get people involved and the two most successful ones are:

1) In flight meals introduction – pictures of food can always draw people’s attention

The outcome of posting this topic was far better than we expected. People started to compare the food among different airlines and apparently we have a leading position in this area. More and more people just became our fans and commented they would choose Cathay Pacific for the next trip because they wanted better food. Followed by this information, the company invited two fans to the First Class Meals Tasting Event held in Beijing and Shanghai, and allowed them to post pictures on their own blogs. The event was only for traditional media before and this was the first time the company considered the power of internet marketing.

2) Lucky draw for guessing the right city – games are always welcomed by bored people


We posted the picture of a destination city every week and randomly picked up two fans with the right answer to send small gifts. We actually didn’t care if they could answer it right; at least they participated in the game and forwarded the information to their friends.

The comments for a post increased from 9 or 10 to 200 since we started the game.

After two months of work, the fans number increased to 3000 so far. The company still needs to be creative in the future because people get tired to the same thing easily.

That’s really an challenging job, but full of fun.