According to this company blog, British Airways launched Metrotwin, a social networking site, in July 2008. As of yet, they are still in the beta phase.
The concept of Metrotwin is as follows:
The online community provides expert recommendations on the best restaurants bars, shops, neighbourhoods and other places in both cities.
In addition, it helps users navigate the vast amount of internet information about the two cities and find the best content quickly.
It enables members to review, rate, save, create profiles, suggest ‘twins’, follow other members’ recommendations and make their own maps and lists.
The network also provides Amazon.com-style personalised recommendations based on user behaviour, and gives every place a score out of 100, which changes dynamically, based on user behaviour.
There are several issues I have with this:
- I am not quite sure who they are targeting. Will the membership base consist of (note: as of their Sept 13th blog post, they were planning on sending 4,000 invites out):
- People who travel the NY-London route frequently?
- Residents of NY/London who don’t fly often but know their restaurants and bars well?
- Business travellers? Tourists?
- What is the connecting thread between the people who will form this community?
- The love of travel?
- The love of good food?
- A sense of adventure to try new things?
- How much better is this site than other sources with the same information?
- Network of friends
- Restaurant guides
- City guides
- Other social networking sites
I still fail to see the value proposition in this venture - I think this is more a case of ‘Social networking is cool! We need a social networking site!’ rather than a well thought out strategic decision. But perhaps in a few weeks/months when the site is fully operational, I may have a different opinion.
Responses to “British Airways’ Metrotwin Site - I Honestly Don’t Get It!”
September 29th, 2008 at 10:02 am
Hi Leon,
Thanks for commenting. It is good to get an insider’s viewpoint as to how this came about and it is good to see an organization take the right steps. You’ll be surprised how often we come across organizations that do something just because everyone else is doing it without giving much thought.
I look forward to seeing its progress.
Thanks,
September 30th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Metrotwin? Yawn!…please wake me up if and when this takes off. Meanwhile, let me put my restaurant reviews on yelp.com.
June 16th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
[...] I blogged about the launch of Metrotwin, and how I did not quite understand the value proposition. To recap, my biggest issues [...]
September 28th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Having worked on the project I can say that there has been an authentic, original and well thought out approach. The internal debates have been challenging, controversial and provocative. The emphasis at a strategic level is to do one or two things really well and enable emergent behaviour, in this case, by the creation and re-use of shareable lists and the quality of expert recommendations. It isn’t about being cool. It’s about an organisation ‘learning by doing’.