Social Media Lessons: The Delta Northwest Airlines Merger |

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These days you are more likely to read about bankruptcies than M&A activity, but Delta’s merger with Northwest Airlines last fall is an interesting case study for marketing and PR professionals responsible for social media integration.

Social media can help with the transition, but it can also add another layer of challenges if each company has a pronounced social media strategy. I have long maintained that successful social media efforts must reflect a company’s corporate DNA. A merger can change all that. A botched social media integration strategy can undo years of hard work.

So how do you preserve a company’s authentic voice when you are combining two different employee cultures, two different customer bases and two different sets of social media practices? In any corporate merger or acquisition, the name of the game is “seamless transitions.”

Social Media Lessons: Learning from Delta

According the Katie Mingo, using social media to integrate Delta Airlines and Northwest Airlines was a top priority. Katie is in charge of content optimization and interactive marketing at Delta. You may have seen her bookend Delta’s inflight safety video.

Corporate blogs: You essentially have three choices when each company has a corporate blog (as opposed to brand blogs) – kill one, keep two going separately or merge them.

Killing one is clearly the quickest solution, but perhaps unnecessarily drastic. In creating a combined company, it’s important to foster good will by courting employees and customers alike. Blogs can help by going beyond the news and providing insights into people making the changes. The logical solution is to repurpose content and link to each other’s blogs. Over time, two blogs will organically become one as the content increasingly overlaps.

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Fortunately for Delta, this was not an issue; Northwest did not have a strong presence. But Delta did use its blog Under the Wing as a platform to “make employees feel more welcome and help customers with the transition.” Believing that is always better to show than tell, the blog essentially replaced what would have been a static list of FAQs.

When the merger closed in late October, Delta used its blog along with ongoing internal and external communications to recognize Northwest’s culture, history and employees. The kickoff posting featured a vintage Northwest timetable. Subsequent postings focused on integration including several about Delta and Northwest employees helping with a Habitat for Humanity project in Brazil.

Open vs Closed, Centralized vs Decentralized Communications: Some corporate cultures are top down and buttoned up. Others are more open and give individual managers more discretion to make communication decisions. As a former vice president of corporate the latter scared the hell out of me, but I recognize that a degree of independence is essential for social media to work.

At Delta, corporate communicates vet all blog posts as they would news releases and other communications. Mingo noted that Northwest employees generally had another layer of approval, which impacted the communication process.

So what happens when open and closed cultures combine? Of course the acquiring company’s culture wins, but here again social media adds a layer to consider in the transition process. Employees need to adjust to how information is communicated. For a more centralized company, a merger can also be an opportunity to experiment with social media – especially if it proved effective at one of the merging companies. Social media tools like wikis and employee forums can also be useful to foster engagement, collaboration and greater familiarity.

Amplifying Traditional Media: Lastly the marriage of mergers and social media can help amplify traditional media. Beyond blogs, Delta’s social media strategy includes Flickr and YouTube.

One video of Northwest Airlines being repainted with the Delta logo and colors went viral leading to 100,000 views. The video caught the attention of The Learning Channel. The program Busted Knuckles did a special on how to change brakes on an airplane. The producers followed an aircraft maintenance technician around. Social media was involved in the promotional phase.

Having been involved in many mergers over the years, I understand the tension that combining cultures and resources can create. Social media should be a required part of the process. Like any use of social media, success rests on maintaining authenticity and respecting your targeted audiences.

Let me get back to you.

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