Singapore Airlines vs Social Media Policy

I had really enjoyed the speech by Mr. Malcolm Burrows last night. It was a fantastic one! I mean, I hardly knew the laws behind the online stuff, but what Mr. Burrows had shared was just incredible. No -  I swear that I am not trying to bootlick, but I think I would appreciate using the internet and social media with much more cautions now, and be even more conservative with what I post and support online, even.

Photo credits by : Lauri Stevens





Found it especially interesting when he brought in a facebook case, which was a rather complex one, which involved parties in different countries.

For this week, I would like to share about Singapore Airlines.. (no, not because of the fact that I am a Singaporean, nor is it the fact that I fly with Singapore Airlines often.) I have recently gotten more interested about this organisation after chatting with my boyfriend's brother who was working for them in the London office for the Europe region.(obviously a British..)

Not sure if Singapore Airlines is famous enough internationally, then again, I think it should be pretty famous, given that every single month, they win all sorts of possible awards internationally across different countries like UK, US, Germany, Turkey, China, Holland...just to name a handful really. The List of awards can go on if you want me to..but I will leave you at that.

So here I am, sharing with you some basic but pretty impressive information about Singapore Airlines(no, I'm not boasting, neither am I having any sense of national pride, I just would like to share, in that sense.)
Singapore Airlines was apparantly founded in 1972, and was the first in the world in the following activities :
- Free headsets, variety of meals and drinks in Economy class
- Introduction of inflight telephones in 1991
- Involvement of a panel of world-renowned chefs in 1998
- Audio and Video on-demand(AVOD) on all flights in 2001
- Flying of the A380 from Singapore to Sydney on 25th October 2007.
Just to name a few of them.
















I have only just discovered today that Singapore Airlines has got its fanpage on our favourite(or at least most of us..) Facebook as well as on Twitter. Apparantly it was started by a real fan of SIA on facebook, and they had then taken that over from that fan, on 5th of September, 2011, with a total count of over 100,000 fans. That is really not that many - if you think about it. Given that it is known to be a world renowned airline. Disappointing to me. Till date, it has about slightly less than 180,000 fans.

Anyway, very unfortunately, after doing all my research, I was not able to find any known cases of the airline getting into trouble with social media policy and the law. However, based on what I have been communicating with one of the top directors in the organisation(sorry, I cannot name names here, as it is highly confidential), here is what I have to say.

Firstly, based on what I have heard, the thing is that within the organisations, only the staff who require the access to the internet for their job, are given the access rights. - which sounds rather insane to me - because if  the organisation is not in Singapore, I believe access to the internet can be considered even as a human right in certain countries, like Estonia, France, Greece and Spain.

Next, for those who are given the access rights to the internet at work, the websites that they visit, it is not being monitored, unless, the IT administrator gets notified of a huge chunk of bandwidth being taken up by that particular user. That said, it is very unlikely, unless the employee actually dares to stream video at work, during working hours. Or worse, surfing pornographic sites at work. That might be too late for the administrator to even get involved. In the worst case scenario, say,the employee has already downloaded quite a number of those obscene videos on his work desk computer. That, might have been tracked down by the police in Singapore. In that case, the employee, would have already gotten in trouble with the law, ruining the reputation of Singapore Airlines, should the police force head down to the employee's desk to search for the material.

Lastly, what if any of their employees, were to blog, or even update a status on facebook, after taking a flight with Singapore Airlines itself, and had received rather poor service(although really rare- as it opposes the organisation's values). Should he/she be fired? Is it right for that employee to post that, after working hours, on his/her own personal computer? Who is to restrict that? Who should be regulating that? (I'm just saying in my opinion that..)It would not be quite right for SIA to fire that particular employee, since he/she was not using the company's resources, to start with, and that was outside of working hours.

What do you think?

Interesting articles I found:
Singapore Airlines finally connecting on social media
Fanpage of Singapore Airlines that turned into an official page
How is a community different from a network?
Behaving appropriately online