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INFS5730 – Social Media Analytics in Practice

Please refer to Appendix 1 for further information about the responsibilities of the group leader and the group members

Case study: Social Media Strategy to address the problem of the CrowdStrike IT outage in the Airline Industry.

On 19 July 2024, what was supposed to be a routine software update, went wrong, triggering one of the most disruptive global IT outages in history and affecting millions of Windows systems worldwide.

Within hours, the disruption spread rapidly across industries, severely impacting operations in many industry sectors including aviation, healthcare, banking, government, and other essential sectors.

In the airline industry, the CrowdStrike-Microsoft IT outage has significantly affected the United States' three biggest airlines. The disruption had immediate and severe consequences. Major U.S. airlines, including Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and American Airlines were forced to temporarily halt new flight departures. While planes that were already in the air were allowed to land safely, no additional departures could proceed until systems were restored. Airlines rely heavily on computer systems to manage almost every part of their operations. These systems handle passenger check-in, boarding passes, baggage tracking, crew scheduling, aircraft dispatch, and internal communication between airport staff and pilots.

When the outage caused these systems to go offline, airline staff could not have access to the critical information needed to operate flights safely and efficiently.

As a result, airports quickly became congested, creating chaos, leading to widespread flight cancellations and delays. Passengers faced long queues, uncertainty, and confusion. Many flights were delayed or cancelled because crews could not be properly assigned and flight plans could not be processed. What was initially perceived as a minor technical software issue quickly turned into a widespread operational disruption affecting millions of travellers across the globe.

Delta Air Lines was the most severely affected, with its operations disrupted for several days. Because a large share of its critical systems, including crew-tracking and scheduling platforms, operated on

Windows-based servers impacted by the outage, Delta faced a prolonged and complex recovery process. Over the five-day disruption, the airline claims that the outage led to the cancellation of approximately 7,000 flights, impacting 1,3 million of unhappy passengers, who were frustrated and expressing complaints that went viral on social media. The airline later estimated that the disruption caused financial losses of between $500 million and $550 million and pursued legal action against CrowdStrike.

By contrast, United Airlines also experienced flight cancellations but was able to recover more quickly.

The airline cancelled over 1,400 flights in the days following the outage; however, its overall disruption was shorter and less severe than of Delta Air Lines. As a result, United was able to restore its operations and return closer to normal service in a shorter period of time.

This unprecedented crisis demonstrated the vulnerability of aviation systems to IT failures and revealed how differences in technological reliance and operational resilience can lead to serious consequences, with significant implications for both brand reputation and financial performance.

The CrowdStrike IT outage went viral on social media and the social media business pages of Delta Airlines and United Airlines have been inundated with negative messages conveying complaints, disappointment and frustration from unhappy customers which created a cascade of negative word of mouth. The outage has also caused a severe damage to the companies’ online reputations, engender customer churn and significant financial losses.

This assessment requires you to:

• Design a new social media strategy for your client (Delta Airlines) to boost their customers’ positiveengagement on X. 

The following are the requirements for the Team Assignment. Please read these requirements carefully before you commence your assignment and then again when you have completed your assignment to ensure that it meets the requirements.

In a hypothetical scenario, your team is approached by Delta Airlines to analyse their social media strategy during the crisis, compare it with the social media strategy implemented by United Airlines during crisis, and suggest a set of actionable recommendations for improvement based on the key lessons learned from the crisis. Overall, your client Delta Airlines seeks your help to design a new effective social media strategy to recover from the damage caused by IT outages, highlighting the serious repercussions of compromised IT systems, regain their customers’ trust and boost their customer’s positive engagement on X.

Typically, creative content would engage customers through "posting more appealing, interactive, and vivid content that captures and holds consumers' attention." (Dhaoui & Webster, 2021). But in a situation of brand crisis, brand responsiveness on social media is crucial (Schultz, Utz, & Goritz, 2011). A significant appeal of social media during brand crisis is its cost-effectiveness as conduit for displaying content that reflects brand voice, providing clarity about the situation and resonating with the audience.

Social media is also a fast channel to reach the wide public before a negativity spiral lead to an online firestorm.

Your Lecturer-in-Charge and tutors will assume the role of your direct managers/mentors. Throughout the term, you will work closely with your team members to analyse Delta Airlines and United Airlines engagement on X and design a successful social media strategy that could help your client (Delta Airlines) thrive on social media even during a situation of brand crisis. To help your team achieve the objectives of this team assignment, four Excel files are made available on Moodle for your team to analyse.

• Brand engagement (Tweets, Retweets, Replies) made by Delta Airlines and United Airlines during the crisis (Brand_Tweets_Delta.xlsx and Brand_Tweets_United.xlsx) over the period between 17th June 2024 and 16th August 2024.

For both companies, the data includes brand and customer engagement starting 1 month prior to the incident and ending 1 month after the incident. The aim is to analyse these datasets to evaluate both brand and customer engagement before and after the crisis for Delta Airlines and United Airlines, discuss what makes an engaging brand post on X based on the data, explain which of the two companies do you think has an overall superior social media strategy, and identify the gaps to design a new successful social media strategy for your client.

Your Team Report must include the following sections:

A.1. Critical Analysis of the social media strategy of Delta Airlines and United Airlines on X during their respective crises.

Critically analyse the brand engagement of Delta Airlines and United Airlines on X during the crises (over the periods of time covered in the datasets). What about the type of posts, the themes/topics conveyed in the posts, the frequency of posting the content, the format used to convey the content, the scheduling, etc.? What makes the brand content posted appealing, unique, original, creative to engage customers? Any differences before and after the IT outage?

A.2. Critical Analysis of customer engagement with Delta Airlines and United Airlines on X.

A.2.1 Critically analyse customers engagement on X. What is the type of engagement performed by customers on X? Do they engage the same way with the brand posts (from Delta Airlines and United Airlines) on X regardless of the type of content? - What type of content do they like, retweet, and reply to? Any differences before and after the IT outage?

A.2.2 Analyse the sentiment conveyed in customers’ tweets, for Delta Airlines and United Airlines before and after the IT outage and discuss the insights you could unveil from the sentiment analysis. We strongly encourage you to use the software R to conduct the sentiment analysis.

Please provide evidence in the form of screenshots taken from your analysis to illustrate your work (R code and the outcomes of your analysis).

A.2.3 Conduct a social network analysis, using NodeXL, to identify the key influencers among customers who are actively engaged on X, for Delta Airlines and United Airlines. Explain how the social network analysis helped you identify those influencers. Then, investigate how did Delta

Airlines and United Airlines engage with those influencers. Please provide evidence in the form of relevant screenshots taken from your social network analysis to illustrate your work.

A.3. Based on your findings in the previous sections, critically compare the social media strategies of Delta Airlines and United Airlines during the crisis, and explain which of the two companies do you think has an overall superior social media strategy and why?

B.1. Propose THREE (3) design considerations for a new social media strategy for Delta Airlines (e.g., type of engagement, topics of the content, frequency of posting, etc) to boost positive customer engagement during a period of brand crisis. Explain how they are critical for the success of Delta Airlines social media strategy.

B.2 Draft a social media strategy for Delta Airlines, based on the proposed design considerations, and your evaluation of both Delta Airlines and United Airlines performance in Part A. Suggestions must be justified and aligned with your findings in the previous sections on social media audit and your team’s discussion.

NB. Throughout the report, your arguments should be justified and supported with academic references and relevant examples.

2.1 Project expectations

To succeed in this project, you will need to manage your learning process carefully – including demonstrating agency in performing self-directed learning, conducting research, taking initiative, and more. These tasks are expected to take an average of 12-15 hours (per week) of your time.

2.2 Project deliverables (30%)

All deliverables will need to be uploaded to Moodle course site by the deadline. Submission instructions will be provided on Moodle.

In this assignment you are required to submit three files: Team Report + Team Presentation Slides + Team Video on Moodle by the Team Leader.

In the case of unequal contribution:

EACH team member must submit the following:

The maximum word length of the report is 4,000 words. There is a (+10%) leeway.Page 7

• Please note that the Table of Contents, Executive Summary, References and Appendices are excluded from the word count.

• You should be mindful of the marks awarded to each part (as per the marking criteria below) when allocated the number of words spend on each part.

• Please note that material presented in excess of the word limit will not be considered when grading the assignment.

Formatting

The proposal should be in ‘business report’ style (but includes academic references where appropriate)

Feel free to make whatever use of tables, figures, and diagrams that you believe appropriate and relevant to support your work.

Specific requirements:

• Arial 12-point font

• 1.5 spacing

• Page numbers on each page

The document you upload should include:

• A suitable frontpage that will impress the client

• Coversheet signed by all team members

• The report

• A full set of references included to justify your arguments in the report.

Lodgement

• You can only upload one report document.

• Only ONE submission from each group is required.

• You are advised to keep a copy of your submission.

The originality of the submission will be checked using Turnitin. Please check the originality report generated by Turnitin during the submission process.

The purpose of the presentation is for your team to showcase and effectively communicate the key findings of your analysis and the actionable recommendations/solutions to help your client thrive on social media.

Who is required to present?

All members of your group must participate in the presentation.

You are expected to coordinate the work assignment before the presentation, e.g., how a member’s absence from presentation will be compensated with his/her other work allocation in the project. Absence from presentation will not be taken into consideration in the peer assessment, unless in special circumstances in which explanation must be provided.

The mark award to the proposal will be applied to all group members, but individual marks may be moderated if the peer assessment and subsequent investigation identified an uneven contribution and effort across the group members.

Slides and video

You are expected to prepare the slides and produce a team video.

Lodgement

Upload your Team Video on Moodle (15 minutes long)

Other Compulsory Requirements

Late Lodgement & Extensions:

Late assignments (without approved extensions) will attract a penalty of 5% of the available marks per day of lateness (including weekends and public holidays). The penalty will be deducted from the mark your assignment is awarded. General information on special consideration for undergraduate and postgraduate courses can be found in the Assessment Implementation Procedure and the Current

References

It is expected that your report will make use of at least ten recent academic journal articles and practitioner articles.

A list of references must be included at the end of the report. The reference list should only list documents / websites that are actually cited in the assignment (references in text).

Appendix 1 – Working in Teams

To ensure fair and equitable distribution of the work effort across the group, each group is required to keep a diary of its activities. Each group member is also required to keep a diary of the activities they undertake on the assignment. This diary is only to be submitted if requested by the lecturer (in case of unequal contribution) along with an individual confidential peer assessment.

Distribution and quality of work

Your group must plan and schedule its activities. It must meet on regular basis while the assignment is being undertaken and ensure that every group member is involved in the completion of the assignment.

The work in the assignment is to be divided among the group members on an equitable basis. You are Page 10 expected to complete your assigned tasks in a professional and diligent manner. You are also expected to contribute in a useful and constructive way to group activities.

It is very important that your group establish its expectations regarding quality, timeliness, and level of effort at the very beginning of the assignment to ensure that you complete your team project, and you submit it on time. Most problems that arise in groups related to differences in these expectations. Being clear about what is expected at the start of the assignment allows group members to clarify the contribution of everyone and organise better the work.

The lecturer in charge will, as a matter of course, call a meeting of the group. At that meeting each group member will be asked to describe in detail their input into the assignment and provide supporting documentation of this effort (i.e. the individual diaries). Where group members are found to be making inadequate effort or delivering a poor-quality product then they will be counselled to improve their effort.

If sufficient improvement is not made to the satisfaction of the group, then the mark awarded to the group members may be moderated to reflect the relative input into the assignment.

Proper academic standards

All assignments are subject to the University’s guidelines regarding academic misconduct and as such plagiarism is as unacceptable in this group assignment as it is in other assignment. If plagiarism is found in your assignment it will be fully pursed asper the University (see https://student.unsw.edu.au/plagiarism for details).

If your group suspects that one of your group member’s work contains plagiarism, then you should raise this with the group member concerned and seek to have the problem rectified. All instances of at plagiarism are considered poor behaviour.

Behaviour in groups

You are expected to treat your fellow group members with dignity and respect. Group meetings and group communications are expected to be conducted in a decorous and professional manner. Poor or inappropriate behaviour in groups will not be tolerated. A group has the right to ask the lecturer to expel a poorly behaved individual from their group. If a group wishes to pursue this action, they must arrange a meeting with the lecturer to discuss the problem. The lecturer will take action as appropriate.

You also have the right to ask the lecturer to remove you from a group if the behaviour of your fellow group members is inappropriate. If you wish to pursue this course of action you must arrange a meeting with the lecturer to discuss the problem. The lecturer will take action as appropriate. Please note that if you are expelled from a group for poor or inappropriate behaviour you are expected to complete the assignment in full and no allowance made when marking assignment for the fact that it is a solo effort.

There are some file-sharing websites that specialise in buying and selling academic work to and from university students.

If you upload your original work to these websites, and if another student downloads and presents it as their own either wholly or partially, you might be found guilty of collusion — even years after graduation.

These file-sharing websites may also accept purchase of course materials, such as copies of lecture slides and tutorial handouts. By law, the copyright on course materials, developed by UNSW staff in the course of their employment, belongs to UNSW. It constitutes copyright infringement, if not academic misconduct, to trade these materials.